One hot midday, as she watched by the bedside of a little patient with a branch of maple in her hand to keep the flies away, she drowsed, and one of the wretched little insects lighted on her moist red lips. Soon thereafter the “walking typhoid” caught her as she was striding past Lum Chapman's blacksmith-shop. Instinctively she kept on toward home, and reached there raving: “Don't let him come—don't let him come!” And when the news got about the heart of Happy Valley almost bled.
Only St. Hilda guessed what the mutterings of the sick girl meant, but she did not heed them, and the professor from New England soon crossed Mason and Dixon's line for the first time in his life. For the first time he fell under the spell of the Southern hills—graceful, gracious big hills, real mountains, densely wooded like thickets to their very tops—so densely wooded, indeed, that they seemed overspread with a great shaggy green rug that swept on and on over the folds of the hills as though billowed up by a mighty wind beneath. And the lights, the mists, the drifting cloud shadows! Why had Juno not wanted him to see them? And when he took to horseback and mounted through that billowing rug, through ferns stirrup-high, with flowers innumerable nodding on either side of the trail and the air of the first dawn in his nostrils—mounted to the top of the Big Black, rode for miles along its gently waving summit, and saw at every turn of the path the majestic supernal beauty of the mighty green waves that swept on and on before him, in wonder he kept asking himself:
“Why—why?”
He had not come into contact yet with the humanity in those hills. The log cabins he had seen from the train—clinging to the hillsides, nestling in little coves amid apple-trees, or close to the banks of rushing little creeks—had struck him as most picturesque and charming, and an occasional old mill, with its big water-wheel, boxed-in, grass-hung mill-race half hidden by weeping willows, had given him sheer delight; but now he was meeting the people in the road and could see them close at hand in doorway and porches of the wretched little houses that he passed. How mean, meagre, narrow, and poverty-stricken must be their lives!
At one cabin he had to stop for mid-day dinner, for the word “lunch,” he found, was unknown. A slatternly woman with scraggling black hair, and with three dirty children clinging to her dirty apron, “reckoned she mought git him a bite,” and disappeared. Flies swarmed over him when he sat in the porch. The rancid smell of bedding struck his sensitive nostrils from within. He heard the loud squawking of a chicken cease suddenly, and his hunger-gnawed stomach almost turned when he suddenly realized just what it meant. When called within, it was dirt and flies, flies and dirt, everywhere. He sat in a chair with a smooth-worn cane bottom so low that his chin was just above the table. The table-cover was of greasy oilcloth. His tumbler was cloudy, unclean, and the milk was thin and sour. Thick slices of fat bacon swam in a dish of grease, blood was perceptible in the joints of the freshly killed, half-cooked chicken, and the flies swarmed.
As he rode away he began to get a glimmer of light. Perhaps Juno—his Juno—had once lived like that; perhaps her people did yet.
There was another mountain to climb, and a stranger who was going his way offered to act as guide. The stranger was a Kentuckian, he said, from the Bluegrass region, and he was buying timber through the hills. He volunteered this, but the New England man made no self-revealment. Instead he burst out:
“How do these people live this way?”
“They have to—they're pretty poor.”
“They don't have to keep—dirty.”