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have minded being run through with a locust thorn and left for the shrikes to pick at. What use all this in the end? The hope worn on indefinitely . . . the desire never fulfilled . . . four o’clock and the ice-grey mornings . . . the cows and dark . . . the cans enormous in the foggy lamplight . . . day come up cold and windy . . . Max sullen as a red clod . . . the endless cooking . . . the sour rim of pails . . . Father’s grey shirts soaking all day in water. . . . There seemed no answer, and the answer lay only in forgetting.
    But the days were warm sometimes. Spring came first to the air, and then to the life of things. The elm trees were green like sulphur smoke, or dust from a dry old fungus-ball; the wild ginger hard-packed still on its roots, but green with a silver mold, and in the ravine I found a moccasin snake coiled and hating, while the cold spring water flowed over his skin, over and over until I grew almost chilled with seeing it. The ground was hard. Things struggled up with their heads bent over. Father began to plough, and cut farther into the woods this year. Acres of wild phlox turned to corn. There was no use to say anything. Not even Merle did any more. Four trees came down, twopin-oaks and some sycamores, and the oaks had a queer and oily smell. No peaches this year. Blossoms stuck scrappily, one or two on a branch; but the apple buds were thick, and the pear trees covered. “A good year,” we said, “—if nothing happens.” (I wondered if anywhere on earth men could say such and such will be, with certainty. No farmer ever could.) One good year and the land would be ours again. I could imagine life free of this weight, so wonderful that only to be alive would be in itself enough. But hope was all we had then; not even belief—unless hope so strong and obstinate that nothing can root it out is called a faith.
    It was queer how little rain came that month, and we thought that the next would bring a flood.

7
    WHEN Kerrin’s school closed in April this year, I dreaded the thought of her being home all day. It seemed to me even then, eight months ago, that there was something more inerasably wrong with her than just a fierce selfishness and discontent. This teaching only held back awhile the black tide of somethingthat had its beginning with her birth. Four years after we came, she had started to teach at the Union County school, although she was only nineteen then and there were some on the board who said it was wrong to have her even as only a substitute for Ally Hines. It wasn’t her age they minded so much, but we never had joined the church; and there was some talk of her “not being the one for the place,” but it dwindled into a mild nothing. Kerrin was good as a teacher and worked much harder than Ally Hines, with her cancerous bones and cough, had ever been able to. Ally had come down sick in the middle of the year, and Kerrin had asked for the place herself. The board would never have thought or considered her of their own accord, but when they heard she was through with high school, which was all that Ally herself had done, they took her for lack of knowing what else to do and being confused with Ally’s sickness as a thing not reckoned on in their almanacs. We were glad, not only because of the money—which Kerrin kept to herself, knowing it gave her a kind of power even though she might have to lend it sometime,—but glad because it took her away from home.
    Even when she was quiet or reading, I could neverfind rest where Kerrin was. None of us could. Only out in the fields was there any peace when she was at home. I would come in the house sometimes and, without seeing or hearing, know she was there, and know too when she was gone without hearing her go. No matter in what sort of mood she was—and there were times when Kerrin was almost fiercely happy and kind—the tautness was never gone, the fear of what she might say or