Dixie Hart

In a blaze of splendor the morning sun broke over themountain, throwing its scraggy brown bowlders, spruce-pines,thorn-bushes, and tangled vines into impenetrable shadow. Massed atthe base and along the rocky sides were mists as dense as clouds,through the filmy upper edges of which the yellow light shone asthrough a mighty prism, dancing on the dew-coated corn-blades,cotton-plants, and already drinking from the fresh-ploughed, mellowsoil of the farm-lands which fell away in gentle undulations to theconfines of the village hard by. "A fellow couldn't ask for aprettier day than this, no matter how greedy he was," Alfred Henleymused as he stood in the doorway of his barn and heard the gnawingof the horses he had just fed in the stalls behind him. A hundredyards distant, on the main-travelled road which ran into thevillage of Chester, only half a mile away, stood his house, theeight rooms of which were divided into two equal parts by an openveranda, in which there was a shelf for water-pails, tinwash-basins, and a towel on a clumsy roller. A slender woman, withharsh, sharp features, older-looking than her thirty years wouldhave justified, and a stiff figure disguised by few attempts atadornment, was sweeping the veranda floor, and in chairs proppedback against the weather-boarding sat an old man and an old womanin the plainest of mountain attire.