“Mother! Mother! Oh, mother!” it came nearer and nearer, till it beat with the sound of a fist on the cabin door. In the piecing out of the instant dream which she started from, she thought as that night when Dylks called her, that it must be Laban; he sometimes called her mother after the baby came, and now she called back, “Laban! Laban!” but the voice came again, “It ain't father; it's me, mother; it's Joey!”
“Oh, dear heart!” she joyfully lamented, and flung herself from her bed, and reeled still drunk with slumber, and pulled up the latch, and flung open the door, and caught her boy to her breast.
“Oh, mother!” he said, laughing and crying. “I'm so hungry!”
“To be sure you're hungry, child; and I'll have you your supper in half a minute, as soon as I can rake the fire open. Lay down on mother's bed there, and rest while I'm gettin' ready for you. The baby won't wake, and I don't care if she does.”
“I s'pose she's grown a good deal. But I am tired,” the boy said, stretching himself out. “Me 'n' Benny run all the way as soon as we come in sight of the crick, and him 'n' Mis' Hingston wanted me to stay all night, but I wouldn't. I wanted to see you so much, mother.”
“Did Mr. Hingston come back with you? Or, don't tell me anything; don't speak, till you've had something to eat.”
“I woon't, mother,” the boy promised, and then he said, “But you ought to see Philadelphy, mother. It's twenty times as big as Wheeling, Benny says, and all red brick houses and white marble steps.” He was sitting up, and talking now; his mother flew about in the lank linsey-woolsey dress she had thrown over her nightgown in some unrealized interval of her labors and had got the skillet of bacon hissing over the coals.
“And to think,” she bleated in self-reproach, “that I'll have to give you rye coffee! You know, Joey dear, there hain't very much cash about this house, and the store won't take truck for coffee. But with good cream in it, the rye tastes 'most as good. Set up to the table, now,” she bade him, when she had put the rye coffee with the bacon and some warmed-up pone on the leaf lifted from the wall.
She let the boy silently glut himself till he glanced round between mouthfuls and said, “It all looks so funny and little, in here, after Philadelphy.”
Then she said, “But you don't say anything about the New Jerusalem. Didn't it come down, after all?” She smiled, but sadly rather than gladly in her skepticism.