The Tinder-Box

It was nice of Jane to write out and get ready her bomb-shell and then go off with Polk, so as not to see it explode. But I'm glad she did. However, I did advise her to take a copy of it along with the reels and the lunch-basket to read to him, as a starter of their day to be devoted to the establishment of a perfect friendship between them.

Polk didn't look at me even once as I helped pack them and their traps into his Hupp, but Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like Polk in his white flannels, and he and Jane made a picture of perfectly blended tailored smartness as they got ready for the break-away.

There are some men that acquire feminine obligations as rough cheviot does lint and Henrietta is one of Polk's when it comes to the fishing days. He takes her so often that she thinks she owns him and all the trout in Little Harpeth, and she landed in the midst of the picnic with her fighting clothes on.

"Where are you and her going at,—fishing?" she asked in a calmly controlled voice that both of them had heard before, and which made us quail in our boots and metaphorically duck our heads.

"Yes, we—er thought we would," he answered with an uncertainty of voice and manner that bespoke abject fear.

"I'll be d—— if you shall," came the explosion, hot and loud. "I want to go fishing with you, Polk, my own self, and she ain't no good for nothing any way. You can't take her!"

"Henrietta!" I both beseeched and commanded in one breath.

"No, she ain't no good at all," was reiterated in the stormy young voice as Henrietta caught hold of the nose of the panting Hupp and stood directly in the path of destruction, if Polk had turned the driving wheel a hair's breadth. "Uncle Peter says that she is er going to turn the devil loose in Glendale, so they won't be no more whisky and no more babies borned and men will get they noses rubbed in their plates, if they don't eat the awful truck she is er going to teach the women to cook for their husbands. An' the men won't marry no more then at all, and I'll have to be a old maid like her."

Now, why did I write weeks ago that I would like to witness an encounter between Jane and Henrietta! I didn't mean it, but I got it!

Without ruffling a hair or changing color Jane stepped out of the Hupp and faced the foe. Henrietta is a tiny scrap of a woman, intense in a wild, beautiful, almost hunted kind of way, and she is so thin that it makes my heart ache. She is being fairly crushed with the beautiful depending weight of her mother and the responsibility of the twins, and somehow she is most pathetic. I made a motion to step between her and Jane, but one look in Jane's face stopped me.

"Dear," she said, in her rich, throaty, strong voice as she looked pleadingly at the militant midget facing her. Suddenly I was that lonesome, homesick freshman by the waters of Lake Waban, with Jane's awkward young arm around me, and I stood aside to let Henrietta come into her herit age of Jane. "Don't you want to come with us?" was the soft question that followed the commanding word of endearment.

"No!" was the short, but slightly mollified answer as Henrietta dug her toes into the dust and began to look fascinated.

"I'm glad you don't want to come, because I've got some very important business to ask you to attend to for me," answered Jane, in the brisk tone of voice she uses in doing business with women, and which interests them intensely by its very novelty and flatters them by seeming to endow them with a kind of brain they didn't know they possessed. "I want you to go upstairs and get my pocketbook. Be careful, for there is over a hundred dollars in the roll of bills—Evelina will give you the key to the desk—and go down to the drug store where they keep nice little clocks and buy me the best one they have. Then please you wind it up yourself and watch it all day to see if it keeps time with the clock in your hall, and if it varies more than one minute, take it back and get another. While you are in the drug store, if you have time, won't you please select me a new tooth-brush and some nice kind of paste that you think is good? Make them show you all they have. Pay for it out of one of the bills."

"Want any good, smelly soap?" I came out of my trance of absolute admiration to hear Henrietta ask in the capable voice of a secretary to a millionaire. Her thin little face was flushed with excitement and importance, and she edged two feet nearer the charmer.

"It would be a good thing to get about a half dozen cakes, wouldn't it?" answered Jane, with slight uncertainty in her voice as if leaving the decision of the matter partly to Henrietta.

"Yes, I believe I would," Henrietta decided judicially. "The 'New Mown Hay' is what Jasper got for Petunia because he hit her too hard last week and swelled her eye. They is a perfumery that goes with it at one quarter a bottle. That makes it all cheaper."

"Exactly the thing, and we mustn't spend money unnecessarily," Jane agreed. "But I don't want to trespass on your time, Henrietta, dear," she added with the deference she would have used in speaking to the President of the Nation League or the founder of Hull House.

"No, ma'am, I'm glad to do it, and I'll go quick 'fore it gets any later in the day for me to watch the clock," answered Henrietta in stately tones that were very like Jane's and which I had never heard her employ before.

And before any of the three of us got our breath her bare little feet were flashing up my front walk.

"Help!" exclaimed Polk as he leaned back from his wheel and fanned himself with his hat. "Do you use the same meth ods with grown beasts that you do with cubs?" he added weakly.

"It's the same she has always used on me, only this is more dramatic. Beware!" I said with a laugh as I insisted on just one squeeze of Jane's white linen arm as she was climbing back into the car.

"That's a remarkably fine child and she should have good, dependable, business-like habits put in the place of faulty and useless ones. Her profanity will make no difference for the present and can be easily corrected. Don't interfere with her attending to my commissions, Evelina. Let's start, Mr. Hayes." And Jane settled herself calmly for the spin out Providence Road.

"All the hundred dollars all by herself, Jane?" I called after them.

"Yes," floated back positively in the wake of the Hupp.

For several hours I attended to the business of my life in a haze of meditation. If Henrietta ticks off the same number of min utes on the woman-clock from Jane's standpoint, that Jane has marked off from her own mother's, high noon is going to strike before we are ready for it.

But it was only an hour or two of high-minded communing with the future that I got the time for, before I was involved in the whirl of dust that swirled around the storm center, to darken and throw a shadow over Glendale about the time of the publication of the Glendale News, which occurs every Thursday near the hour of noon, so that all the subscribers can take that enterprising sheet home to consume while waiting for dinner, and can leave it for the women of their families to enjoy in the afternoon.

I suspect that the digestion of Jane's Equality rally invitation interfered with the digestion of much fried chicken, corn, and sweet potatoes, under the roof-trees of the town and I spent the afternoon in hearing results and keeping up the spirits of the insurgents.

Caroline came in with her head so high that she had difficulty in seeing over her very slender and aristocratic nose, with a note from Lee Greenfield which had just come to her, asking her to go with him in his car over to Hillsboro to spend the day with Tom Pollard's wife, a visit he knows she has been dying to make for two months, for she was one of Pet's bridesmaids. He made casual and dastardly mention that there would be a moon to come home by, but ignored completely the fact that Tuesday was the day on which he had been invited by the League, of which he knew she was a member, to meet and rally around the C. & G. Commission.

I helped her compose the answer, and I must say we hit Lee only in high spots. I could see she was scared to death, and so was I, but her dander was up, and I backed mine up along side it for the purpose of support. Besides I feel in my heart that that note will dynamite the rocky old situa tion between them into something more easily handled.

She had just gone to dispatch the missive by their negro gardener when Mamie and Sallie came clucking in. Mamie's face was pink and high-spirited, but Sallie was in one complete slump of mind and body.

"Mr. Haley has just stopped by to say that he thinks no price is too great to pay for peace, and fellowship, and good-will in a community," she said, as she dropped into a rocker and looked pensively after the retreating figure of the handsome young Dominie, who had accompanied them to the gate but wisely no farther. He didn't know that Jane had gone with Polk.

"And women to pay the price," answered Mamie, spiritedly. "I have just told Ned that as yet I do not know enough to argue the question of woman's wrongs with him, but I have learned a few of her rights. One of mine is to have him accept any invitation I am responsible for having my friends of fer him, and to accompany me to the entertainment if I desire to go. I reminded him that I had not troubled him often as an escort since my marriage. He was so scared that he almost let little Ned drop out of his arms, and he got in an awful hurry to go to town, but he asked me to have his gray flannels pressed before Tuesday and to buy him a blue tie to go with a new shirt he has. I never like to spank Ned or the children, but I must say it does clear the atmosphere."

"You don't think we could put it off or—or—" Sallie faltered.

"No!" answered Mamie and I together, and as I spoke I called Jasper to set out more rockers and have Petunia get the tea-tray ready, for I saw Aunt Augusta go across the road to collect Cousin Martha and Mrs. Hargrove and the rest, while Nell whirled by in her rakish little car on her way to the Square and called that she would be back.

When Nell used a thousand dollars of her own money, left her by her grandmother, to buy that little Buick, Glendale promptly had a spell of epilepsy that lasted for days. The whole town still dodges and swears when it sees her coming, for she drives with a combination of feminine recklessness and masculine speed that is to say the least alarming. To see Aunt Augusta out for a spin with her is a delicious sight.

And it was most interesting to listen to a minute description of the composite fit thrown by the male population of Glendale, at their rally invitation, but as time was limited I finally coaxed the conversation around to the subject of the viands to be offered the lordly creatures in the way of propitiation for the insult that we were forcing them to swallow by taking matters in our own hands, and then we had a really glorious time.

I am glad I have had a year or more in Paris, months in Italy, weeks in Berlin, and a sojourn in England, just so that I can be sure myself and assure the others with authority that there are no such cooks in all the world as the women in the Harpeth Valley of Tennessee, United States of America.

The afternoon wore away on the wings of magic, and the long, purple shadows were falling across the street, a rustle of cool night wind was stirring the tree-tops and the first star was coming timidly out into the gloaming, before they all realized that it was time to hurry and scurry under roof-trees.

Lee Greenfield was waiting at the gate for Caroline.

Just as Henrietta had taken a last peep at the clock on the hall table and gone to answer Sallie's call to come and help Aunt Dilsie in the bedding of the Kitten and the Pup, Polk's Hupp stopped at the gate, and he and Jane came up the front walk in the twilight together.

She had on his flannel coat over her linen one and his expression was one of glorified and translucent daze. I didn't look at her—I felt as if I couldn't. I was scared! For a second she held me in her arms and kissed me, really—the first time she had ever done it in all my life—and then went on upstairs with a nice, cool good-night and "thank you" to Polk.

"Evelina," he said, as he handed me the empty lunch-basket and also the empty fish-bucket, the first he had ever in his life brought in from Little Harpeth, "I was right about that Hallelujah chorus being the true definition of the real woman—only they are more so. I have seen a light, and you pointed the way. Will you forgive me for being what I was—and trust me—with—with—good-night!" He was gone!

Jane's kiss had been one of revelation—to me!

For a long time I sat out there in the cool, hazy, windy autumn twilight breeze, that was heavy with the scent of luscious wild grapes and tasseled corn, fanning the flame of loneliness in me until I couldn't have stood it any longer if a tall gray figure of relief had not come up the street and called me down to my front gate.

"Hail the instigator of a bloodless revolution," laughed the Crag as I stopped myself with difficulty on the opposite side of the gate from him. "The city fathers will have to capitulate, and now for the reign of the mothers!"

"And the same old route to subjection chosen, through their stomachs to their civic hearts," I answered impudently.

Overlooking my pertness he went on:

"Mayor Shelby was at home with Mrs. Augusta for two hours after dinner and, as I came by the post-office, I heard him telling Polk in remarkably chastened, if not entirely chaste language, that it was 'better to let the women have their kick-up on a feeding proposition than on something worse,' as he classically put it."

"I know it is a great victory," I answered weakly, "but I'm too tired to glory in it. I wish I was Sallie's Puppy being trotted across Aunt Dilsie's knee, or Kit, getting a rocking in Cousin Martha's arms."

"Would any other arms do for the rocking?" came in a queer, audacious voice, with a note in it that stilled something in me and made all the world seem to be holding its breath.

"I'm tired of revoluting and it's—it's tenderness I want," I faltered in a voice that hardly seemed strong enough to get so far up out of my heart as to reach the ears of the Crag as he bent his head down close over mine. He had come on my side of the gate at the first weak little cry I had let myself make a minute or two before.

"Is this right?" he asked, as he gently took me in his arms, hollowed his shoulder for a place for my head, and leaning against the old gate he began to swing me gently to and fro, his cheek against my hair and humming Aunt Dilsie's

"Swing low sweet chariot, fer to carry me home."

It was.

I know now what I want and I am going to have it. I'll fight the whole world with naked hands for him. And I'm also going to find some way to get him with all his absurd niceties of honor intact, just because that will make him happier.

I'll begin at the beginning and some way unclasp those gourdy tendrils that Sallie has been strangling him with. I will bunch all the rest of his feminine collection and take them on my own hands. I'm going to make a Governor out of him, and then a United States Senator and finally a Supreme Judge. Help! Think of the old Mossback being a progressive, but that's my party and Jane's.

I know he is going to hate terribly to have me ask him to marry me, and I hate to hurt him so, but it is my duty to get Jane's fifty thousand dollars so the Five may be as happy as I am to-night; only there aren't five other Crags. I know it will be a life-long mortification to him to have me do it, but he lost his chance to-night grand-mothering me. Still, I did turn my lips away. I was not quite ready then—I am now.

If he wants to go on wearing clothes like that I'm going to let him, even on the Senate floor, but I can't ever stand for Cousin Jasmine to cut his hair any more. I want to do it myself, and I'm going to tell her so, and why. She and I have cried over that miniature of the lost young Confederate cousin of hers and she'll understand me.

But as I think it over—it always is best to be kind, and I believe I'll let him get through this rally—it's just four days—free and happy man.

I don't know whether to go in and wake up Jane or not. I would like to go to sleep with that kiss revelation between us, but maybe it is my duty to the Five to extract some data from her while it is fresh, on the foam. I am afraid it is going to go hard with her, but somehow I have a newborn faith in Polk that makes me feel that he will make it as easy as he can for her.

Isn't it a glorious thing to realize that neither she nor I will have to sit and be tortured by waiting to see what those men are going to do?

CHAPTER IX

As to the rally, they have stood aside with their hands in their pockets and their noses in the air, and if it hadn't been for Aunt Augusta and Nell and Jane being natural-born carpenters and draymen, we might have had to give it up and let them go on with it to their own glory.

When Nell and Jane went to see Mr. Dodd about building the long tables to serve the barbecue dinner on, he said he was too busy to do it and hadn't even any lumber to sell.

Then things happened in my back yard that it sounds like a romance to write about. Jane sent me over to borrow the Crag's team and wagon and Henrietta and Cousin Martha and any of the rest of his woman-impedimenta that I could get. He was out of town, trying a case over at Bolivar, and wouldn't get back until Monday night.

I am glad he wasn't here, for it would have gone hard with me to treat him in the manner that Jane decided it was best for all the women in Glendale to treat all the men in this crisis. It sounded sweet and cold as molasses dispenses itself to you in midwinter, and I could see it was a strain on Mamie and Caroline and Mrs. Kirkland, Nell's mother, and young Mrs. Dodd, the carpenter's wife,—the Boston girl that married him before she realized him,—to keep it up from day to day.

Besides that I'm going to be a politician's wife—though he doesn't know it yet—and I want the Crag to be away from the necessity of taking any sides in this civilized warfare. That's one reason I am such a go-between for Uncle Peter and the League, I am making votes for my man, so I consider it all right for me never to deliver any of their messages to each other as they are given to me, but to twist them into agreeability to suit myself.

Sallie said the Dominie was entirely on our side and that was why she went walking with him Sunday afternoon. All the other men were cool to him and he is so sensitive.

But to get back to the back yard. I glory in writing it and want the Five to consider it as almost sacred data, though I hope they will never have to do likewise.

Jane and Nell and Aunt Augusta took the two axes and one large hammer and tore down my back fence while I and the others loaded the planks on the wagon. Jane appointed Henrietta to sit and hold the slow old horses in case they should have got demoralized by the militant atmosphere pervading Glendale and try to bolt. I never saw any human being enjoy herself as Henrietta did, and it was worth it all just to look into her radiant countenance.

Jane took all the hard top blows to do herself and left the unloosening of the lower nails to Aunt Augusta while Nell ripped off the planks that stuck. I could almost hear Nell's long, polished finger nails go with a rip every time she jerked a particularly tough old plank into subjection, and Aunt Augusta dispensed encouraging axioms about pioneer work as she banged along behind Jane. Jane herself looked as cool as a cucumber, didn't get the least bit ruffled, and had the expression on her face that the truly normal woman has while she is hemming a baby's flannel petticoat.

And though during the day many delightful crises were precipitated, the most interesting were the expressions that devastated Polk Hayes's and Lee Greenfield's faces as they came around the side of the house to see what all that hammering was about.

"Caroline!" exclaimed Lee, in perfect agony, as he beheld the lady of his ardent, though long-restrained, affections poised across the wheel of the wagon tugging at the middle of a heavy plank which Mrs. Dodd and I were pushing up to her, while Mamie, the mother of seven, stood firmly on top of the wagon guiding it into place.

"Help!" gasped Polk, as he started to take the ax from Jane by force.

Then we all stopped while Jane quietly gurgled the molasses of the situation to them, and sent them on down the street sadder and wiser men. I thought Polk was going to cry on her shoulder before he was finally persuaded to go and leave us to our fate, and the expression on Lee's face as he looked up at torn, dirty, perspiring Caroline, with a smudge on her nose and blood on her hand from an absolutely insignificant scratch, was such as ought to have been on Ned's face as he ought to have been standing by Mamie with the asafetida bottle. That's mixed up but the Five ought to catch the point.

It took up all of Saturday afternoon and part of Monday morning, but we built those tables, thereby disciplining masculine Glendale with a severity that I didn't think could have been in us.

We all rested on Sunday, that is, ostensibly. Jane put down all sorts of things on paper that everybody had to do on Monday and on Tuesday. Henrietta sat by her in a state of trance and it did me good to see Sallie out in the hammock at Widegables taking care of both the Kit and the Pup, laboriously assisted by panting Aunt Dilsie, because Jane explained to her so beautifully that she needed a lot of Henrietta's time, that Sallie acquiesced with good-natured bewilderment. Of course, Cousin Jasmine helped her some, but she was busy aiding Cousin Martha to beat up some mysterious eggs in the kitchen—with the shutters shut because it was Sunday. It was something that takes two days to "set" and was to be the pièce de résistance, after the barbecue.

Mrs. Hargrove couldn't help Sallie at all with the kiddies, either, because she was looking through all her boxes and bundles for a letter from her son, which she thought said something about favoring woman's rights, and if it is like she thinks it is, she is going to go to the barbecue and get things nice and hot instead of having them brought to her cold.

I had hoped to get a few minutes Sunday afternoon to myself so I could go up into the garret and look through one of the trunks I brought from Paris with me to see how many sets of things I have got left. I am going to need a trousseau pretty soon, and I might need it more suddenly than I expect. I don't see any reason for people's not marrying immediately when they make up their minds, and my half of ours is made up strong enough to decidedly influence rapidity in his. But then I really don't believe that the Crag would care very much about the high lights of a trousseau, and it was just as well that Nell came in to get me to help her write a letter to National Headquarters to know if she could have any kind of assignment in the Campaign for the Convention to alter the Constitution in Tennessee when it meets next winter.

"Have you made up your mind fully to go in for public life, Nell?" I asked mildly. "Some of your friends might not like it very much and—and—"

"If you mean Polk Hayes, Evelina," Nell answered with the positiveness that only a very young person can get up the courage to use, "I have forgot that I was ever influenced by his narrow-minded, primitive personality at all. If I ever love and marry it will be a man who can appreciate and further my real woman's destiny."

"Well, then, that's all right," I answered with such relief in my heart that it must have showed in my voice and face. I had worried about Nell since I could see plainly, though she hasn't told me yet, and I am sure he doesn't realize it, that Jane had decided Folk's destiny. Nell is not twenty-one yet and she will find lots of men in the world that will be fully capable of making her believe they feel that way about her destiny, until they succeed in tying her up to using it for the real utilitarian purposes they are sure such a pretty woman is created for.

It will take men in general another hundred years yet, and lots of suffering, to realize that a woman's destiny is anything but himself, and get to housekeeping with her on that basis.

Of course, I see the justice and need of perfect equality in all things between the sexes, emotional equality especially, but I hope the time will never come when men get as hungry to see their women folks as said feminists get to see them, after they have been away about four days out in the Harpeth Valley. It takes a woman's patience to stand the tug.

The Crag didn't jog into Glendale on his raw-boned old horse until one-thirty Monday night. I had been watching down Providence Road for him from my pillow ever since I put out my light at eleven, because Jane had decided that it was our duty to go to bed early so as to be as fresh as possible for the rally in the morning. She had walked to the gate with Polk at ten and hadn't come back until eleven, so, of course, she was ready to turn in. It was just foolish, primitive old convention that kept me from slipping on my slippers and dressing-gown—I've got the prettiest ones that ever came across the Atlantic, Louise de Mereton, Rue de Rivoli, Paris—and going down to the gate to see him for just a minute. That second he stood undecided in the middle of the road looking at my darkened house was agony that I'm not going to put up with very much longer.

Scientifically I feel that I'm thinking life with one lobe of my brain and breathing with one lung. Still I made myself go to sleep.

Everybody believes in God in a different kind of way, and mine satisfies me entirely. I know that the hairs of my head are numbered and that not a sparrow falls; and I don't stop at that. I feel sure that my tears are measured and my smiles are rejoiced over, and when I want a good day to come to me I ask for it and mostly get it. There never was another like the one He sent me down this morning on the first slim ray of dawn that slid over the side of Old Harpeth!

The sun was warm and jolly and hospitable from the arrival of its first rays, but the wind was deliciously cool and bracing and full of the wine of October. It came racing across the fields laden with harvest scents, blustering a bit now and then enough to bring down a shower of nuts or to make the yellow corn in the shocks in the fields rustle ominously of a winter soon to come.

The maples on the bluff were garmented in royal crimson brocaded with yellow, the buck-bushes that grew along the edges of the rocks were strung with magenta berries and regiments of tall royal purple iron weeds and yellow-plumed golden-rod were marshaled in squads and clumps for a background for the long tables.

Jane and I with Henrietta were out by the old gray moss rock at the first break of day, installing Jasper and Petunia and a few of their confrères. Jasper has always been king of all Glendale barbecue-pits and he had had them dug the day before and filled with dry hickory fires all night, and his mien was so haughty that I trembled for the slaves under his command. His basket of "yarbs" was under the side of the rock in hoodoo-like shadows and the wagons of poor, innocent, sacrificed lambs and turkeys and sucking-pigs were backed up by the largest infernal pit. Petunia was already elbow deep in a cedar tub of corn meal for the pones, and another minion was shucking late roasting-ears and washing the sweet potatoes to be packed down with the meat by eight o-clock. A wagon was to collect the baked hams and sandwiches and biscuits and confections of all variety and pedigree from the rest of the League at ten o'clock.

We didn't know it then but another wagon was already being loaded very privately in town with ice and bottles, glasses and lemons and mint and kegs and schoon ers. I am awfully glad that the Equality League had forgotten all about the wetting up of the rally, because I don't believe we would have been equal to the situation with Aunt Augusta and Jane both prohibition enthusiasts, but it did so promote the sentiment of peace and good cheer during the day for us to all feel that the men had not failed us in a crisis, as well as in the natural qualities inherent in their offering for the feast. There was a whole case of Uncle Peter's private stock. Could human nature have done better than that?

But if we did forget to provide the liquids, I am glad we had the foresight to provide other viands enough to feed a regiment, because a whole army came.

"Evelina," gasped Jane, as we stood on the edge of the bluff that commands a view of almost all the Harpeth Valley stretched out like the very garden of Eden itself, crossed by silver creeks, lined with broad roads and mantled in the richness of the harvest haze, "can all those wagons full of people be coming to accept our invitation?"

"Yes, they're our guests," I answered, with the elation of generations of rally-givers rising in my breast, as I saw the stream of wagons and carriages and buggies, with now and then a motor-car, all approaching Glendale from all points of the compass.

"Have we enough to feed them. Jasper?" she turned and asked in still further alarm.

"Nothing never give out in Glendale yit, since we took the cover offen the pits for Old Hickory in my granddad's time," he answered, with a trace of offense in his voice, as he stood over a half tub of butter mixing in his yarbs with mutterings that sounded like incantations. I drew Jane away for I felt that it was no time to disturb him, when the basting of his baked meats was just about to begin.

I was glad that about all the countryside had gathered, unhitched their wagons, pick eted their horses, and got down to the enjoyment of the day before the motor-cars bringing the distinguished guests had even started from Bolivar. It was great to watch the farmers slap neighbors on the back, exchange news and tobacco plugs, while the rosy women folks grouped and ungrouped in radiant good cheer with children squirming and tangling over and under and around the rejoicings.

"This, Evelina," remarked Jane, with controlled emotion in her voice and a mist in her eyes behind their glasses, "is not only the bone and sinew but also the rich red blood in the arteries of our nation. I feel humbled and honored at being permitted to go among them."

And the sight of dear old Jane "mixing" with those Harpeth Valley farmer folk was one of the things I have put aside to remember for always. They all knew me, of course, and I was a bit teary at their greetings. Big motherly women took me in their arms and younger ones laid their babies in my arms and laughed and cried over me, while every few minutes some rugged old farmer would call out for Colonel Shelby's "little gal" and look searchingly in my face for the likeness to my fire-eating, old Confederate, politician father.

But it was Jane that took them by storm and kept them, too, through the crisis of the day. Jane is the reveille the Harpeth Valley has been waiting for for fifty years. I thought I was, but Jane is it.

And it was into an atmosphere of almost hilarious enjoyment that the distinguished Commission arrived a few minutes before noon, just as Jasper's barbecue-pits were beginning to send forth absolutely maddening aromas.

Nell whirled up the hill first and turned her Buick across the road by the bluff with that rakish skill of hers that always sends my heart into my throat. And whom did she have sitting at her blue, embroidered linen elbow but Richard Hall himself? Good old big, strong dandy Dickie, how great it was to see him again, and if I had had my own heart in my breast it would have leaped with delight at the sight of him! But even the Crag's that I had exchanged mine for, though it was an entire stranger to Dickie, beat fast enough in sympathy with the dance in my eyes to send the color up to my face in good fashion as I hurried across a clump of golden-rod to meet him.

"Evelina, the Lovely!" he exclaimed in his big booming voice, as he took me by both shoulders and shook me instead of shaking merely my hand.

"Richard the Royal!" I answered in our old Quartier Latin form of greeting. I didn't look right into his eyes as I always had, however, and something sent a keen pain through the exchanged heart in my breast at the thought that I might be obliged to hurt the dandy old dear.

But suddenly the sight of Nell's loveli ness cheered me. She had had Dick in that car with her ever since nine o'clock, almost three hours, showing him the sights of that teeming heavy lush harvest countryside around Bolivar and Glendale, all over which are low-roofed old country houses which brood over families that cluster around the unit that one man and a woman make in their commonwealth. Nell's eyes were sweet as she looked at him. I'll wait and see if I need to worry over him. With the fervor I felt I had a right to, I then avoided the issue of Richard's eyes, put it up to God and Nell, and introduced him to Jane.

And while the three of them stood waiting for Nell to back up the Buick and put her spark-plug in her pocket,—only Richard calmly took it and put it in his,—the rest of the cars came up the hill and turned into the edge of the golden-rod.

Aunt Augusta was in the first one with the Chairman of the Commission, whose name even would have paralyzed anybody but Aunt Augusta; and Mamie and Cousin Martha, Caroline and several more of the ladies made up the rest of the Committee who had gone to escort the distinguished guests to the rally.

The Crag was in the last car with a perfectly delicious old gray-haired edition of Dickie, and I almost fell on both their necks at once. What saved them was Polk appearing between us with three long mint-topped glasses.

I'm glad old Dick immediately had his eyebrows well tangled in the mint of his julep, for I got my own eyes farther down into Cousin James's deep gray ones than I expected and it was hard to come up. I hadn't had a plunge in them for three days and I went pretty deep.

"Eve!" he said softly, as he raised his glass and smiled across his green tuft.

Yes, I know he knows that I know, there is an answer to that name when he says it that way, but I'm not going to give it until I am ready and the place is romantically secluded enough to suit me. He just dares me when he says it to me before other people. That reminds me, the harvest moon is full to-night and rises an hour later every evening from now on. I don't want to wait another month before I propose to him. I've always chosen moonlight for that catastrophe of my life. I wonder if men have as good times planning the culmination of their suits as I am having with mine?

But I had to come down quickly to a little thing like the rally and give the signal to feed all the five hundred people, who by that time were nice, polite, ravening wolves, for Jasper had uncovered the turkey-pit to keep them from getting too brown while the lambs caught up with them.

Jane was the master of ceremonies, because I balked at the last minute. I think I would be capable of managing even a National Convention in Chicago—that far away from the Harpeth Valley,—but I couldn't do it with my friends of pioneer generations looking on. A man or woman never grows up at all to the woman who has knitted baby socks for them or the man who has let them ride down the hill on the front of his saddle.

And at the head of the center table Jane asked the Crag to sit beside her, so that he would be in place to command attention for her when she wanted to speak, and where everybody could hear him when he did.

And while the table was piled high and emptied, and piled high again, so many bouquets of oratory were culled, tied, and cast at the guests along the table that I believe they would have been obliged to pay exclusive attention to them if the things to eat had not been just as odoriferous and substantial. Before dinner was over everybody had spoken that was of a suitable age, and some that had heretofore in the Har peth Valley been considered of an unsuitable sex.

Jane's speech of welcome made such an impression that it is no wonder some of the old mothers in Israel got up to iterate it, as the dinner progressed.

She, as usual, refrained from prejudice-smashing and stones-at-glass-houses throwing, and she hadn't said ten sentences before she had the whole feeding multitude with her.

She began on the way our pioneer mothers had to contrive to keep larders stocked and good things ready for the households, and she tickled the palate of every man present by mentioning every achievement in a culinary way that every woman of his household had made in all the generations that had gone over Harpeth Valley. She called all the concoctions by their right names, too, and she always gave the name of the originator, who was some dear old lady that was sleeping in the Greenwood at the foot of the hill, or in some grave over at Providence or Hillsboro or Bolivar, and who was grandmother or great-grandmother to a hundred or more of the guests. I had wondered why Jane had been poring over that old autograph manuscript receipt book in my desk for days, and as she paid these modern resurrecting compliments to the long gone cooks, tears and laughed literally deluged the table.

And as she built up, achievement by achievement, the domestic woman-history of the valley, Jane showed in the most insidious way possible how the pioneer women had been really the warp on which had been woven the woof of the whole history of their part of the Nation, political, financial, and religious. I never heard anything like it in all my life, and as I looked down those long tables at those aroused, tense, farmer faces, I knew Jane had cracked the geological crust of the Harpeth Valley, and built a brake that would stop any whirl wind on the woman-question that might attempt to come in on us over the Ridge from the outside world. They saw her point and were hard hit. When "Votes for Women" gets to coming down Providence Road the farmers will hitch up a wagon and take mother and the children with a well-packed lunch basket to meet it half way. This is a prophecy!

Then, after Jane sat down, I don't believe such a speechifying ever was before as resounded out over the river, even in the time of Old Hickory. Everybody had something to say and got to his feet to say it well, even if some of them did brandish a turkey wing or a Iamb rib to emphasize their points.

And the women were the funniest things I ever beheld, as we were treated to one maiden speech after another, issuing from the lips of plump matrons anywhere from thirty to sixty. They had never done it before, but liked it after they had tried.

Mother Mayberry from Providence, who is the grand old woman of the whole valley, having established her claim to the title thirty years ago by taking up her dead doctor husband's practice and "riding saddlebags to suffering ever since," as she puts it, broke the feminine ice by rising from her seat by the side of one of the entranced Magnates,—who had been so delighted with her and her philosophies that he could hardly do his dinner justice,—and addressing the rally in her wonderful old voice with her white curls flying and her cheeks as pink as a girl's.

"Children," she said, after everybody had clapped and clapped so she couldn't get a start for several minutes, "The Harpeth Valley women have been a-marching along behind the men for many a day, because their strong shoulders had to break undergrowth for both, but now husbands and fathers and sons have got their feet up on the bluff of Paradise Ridge, and it does look like they will be a-reaching down their hands to help us up, in the break of a new day, to stand by their side; and I, for one, say mount!—I'm ready!"

A perfect war of applause answered her, and Dickie's father got up to go down the whole length of the table to shake hands with her, but had to wait until she came out of the embrace of Nell's fluffy arms, and got a hand free from the Magnate on one side and Aunt Augusta on the other.

Even Sallie began to look speechful, and I believe she would have got up and spoken a few words on the subject of women, and how they need men to look after them, but she said something to Mr. Haley, who shook his head and then got up and prosed beautifully to us for ten minutes, and would have gone on longer, if he hadn't seen Henrietta begin to look mutinous.

The feast had begun at one o'clock, but by Jasper's skilful maneuvering of one gorgeous viand after the other, into the right place, by having relays of pones browned to the right turn and potatoes at the proper bursting point, it had been prolonged until the shadows of late afternoon were beginning to turn purple.

"Don't nobody ever leave one of my barbecue tables until sundown begins to tetch up the empty bones," has been his boast for years. And as he had cleared away the last scrap from the last table, he leaned against a tree, exhausted and triumphant, with alert, adoring eyes fixed on the Crag, who had risen in his place at the head of the long central table.

I had felt entirely too far away from him down at the other end with one of the junior Magnates and Dickie, but I was glad then that I sat so I could look straight into his face as the light from across the Harpeth Valley illumined it without, while a wonderful glow lit it from within.

All of the others had spoken of the achievements of their families and fore fathers and vaunted the human history of the valley, but he spoke of the great hill-rimmed Earth Pocket itself. He gave the Earth credit for the crops that she had yielded up for her children's sustenance. He described how she had bred forest kings for the building of their homes, granted stores of fuel from her mines for their warming, and nourished great white cotton patches and flocks of sheep to clothe them from frosts and winds.

And as he spoke in a powerful voice that intoned up in the tree-tops like a great deep bell, he turned and looked out over the valley with an expression like what must have been on Moses's face when he saw into the promised land.