The woman left her work and took off her bonnet, showing her grey hair drawn into a skimpy knot at the back of her head, and leaving in high relief her strong, honest, candid features, on which the refinements of all benign impulses effaced the effects of poverty and ignorance. She crossed the room to the old man's chair; her velvety voice soothed him. He suffered himself to be lifted by his son and grandson, and carried away bodily to bed in the room across the passage. In the meantime the woman filled a tin cup with lard, placing in its midst a button tied in a bit of cloth to serve as a wick, and lighted it at the fire, while the cub presided with sniffing curiosity at the unusual proceeding, pressing up close against her as she knelt on the hearth, well knowing that she was not to be held in fear nor in any special respect by young bears.
'I'm goin' ter gin him a button-lamp ter sleep by, bein' ez he hev tuk the baby in his head agin,' she said to her father in explanation; 'he won't feel so lonesome ef he wakes up.'
He had looked keenly after his venerable compeer as the paralytic was borne across the uninclosed passage between the two rooms.
'He's breaking some. He's aging,' he said critically; not without sympathy, but with a stalwart conviction that his own feebleness was as strength to the other's weakness. 'He's breaking some,' he repeated, with a physical vanity that might have graced a prize-fighter.
The next moment there came sharp and shrill through the open door the old man's voice, high and glib in cheerful forgetfulness, conversing with his attendants as they got him to bed.
'Whenst I war young,' he cried, 'I went down to Sevierville wunst. 'Twar when they war a-runnin' of Old Hickory.'
'Thar it is again!' exclaimed the ancient Republican. 'Old Hickory war bad enough when he war alive; but I b'lieves he's wusser now that he is dead, with this hyar old critter a-moanin' 'bout him night and day. I'd feel myself called ter fling him of'n the bluff, ef it warn't that he hev got the palsy, an' I gits sorry fur him wunst in a while. An' then I b'lieves that ennybody what is a Dimmycrat air teched in the head, an' ain't 'sponsible fur thar foolishness, 'kase sensible folks ain't Dimmycrats. That's been my 'speriunce fur eighty year, an' I hev hed no call ter change my mind. So I hev to try my patience an' stan' this hyar old critter's foolishness, but it air a mighty tough strain.'
V.
The shadows of the great dead trees in the midst of the Settlement were at their minimum in the vertical vividness of the noontide. They bore scant resemblance to those memorials of gigantic growths which towered, stark and white, so high to the intensely blue sky; instead, they were like some dark and leafless underbrush clustering about the sapless trunks. The sandy stretch of the clearing reflected the sunlight with a deeply yellow glare, its poverty of soil illustrated by frequent clumps of the woolly mullein-weeds. The Indian corn and the sparse grass were crudely green in the enclosures about the grey, weather-beaten log-houses, which stood distinct against the dark, restful tones of the forest filling the background. The mountains with each remove wore every changing disguise of distance: shading from sombre green to a dull purple; then overlaid with a dubious blue; next showing a true and turquoise richness; still farther, a delicate transient hue that has no name; and so away to the vantage-ground of illusions, where the ideal poises upon the horizon, and the fact and the fantasy are undistinguishably blended. The intermediate valleys appeared in fragmentary glimpses here and there; sometimes there was only the verdure of the tree-tops; one was cleft by a canary-coloured streak which betokened a harvested wheat-field; in another blazed a sapphire circle, where the vertical sun burned in the waters of a blue salt 'lick.'