By Will N. Harben.
Chapter I.
Ann Boyd stood at the open door of her corn-house, a square, one-storied hut made of the trunks of young pine-trees, the bark of which, being worm-eaten, was crumbling from the smooth hard-wood. She had a tin pail on her arm, and was selecting “nubbins” for her cow from the great heap of husked corn which, like a mound of golden nuggets, lay within. The strong-jawed animal could crunch the dwarfed ears, grain and corn together, when they were stirred into a mush made of wheat-bran and dish-water.
Mrs. Boyd, although past fifty, showed certain signs of having been a good-looking woman. Her features were regular, but her once slight and erect figure was now heavy, and bent as if from toil. Her hair, which in her youth had been a luxuriant golden brown, was now thinner and liberally streaked with gray. From her eyes deep wrinkles diverged, and the corners of her firm mouth were drawn downward. Her face, even in repose, wore an almost constant frown, and this habit had deeply gashed her forehead with lines that deepened when she was angry.
With her pail on her arm, she was turning back towards her cottage, which stood about a hundred yards to the right, beneath the shade of two giant oaks, when she heard her name called from the main-travelled road, which led past her farm, on to Darley, ten miles away.
“Oh, it’s you, Mrs. Waycroft!” she exclaimed, without change of countenance, as the head and shoulders of a neighbor appeared above the rail-fence. “I couldn’t imagine who it was calling me.”
“Yes, it was me,” the woman said, as Mrs. Boyd reached the fence and rested her pail on the top rail. “I hain’t seed you since I seed you at church, Sunday. I tried to get over yesterday, but was too busy with one thing and another.”