it,—­only there weren’t any children.  There was only the boy, and he hated tobacco.  He was poor, and his father was a hard man.  He had no time to play or to learn—­he worked all day in the fields like a hand.  He had to work like the men at the lower Quarter, like Domingo and Cato and Indian Jim.  He worked all the time.  I never saw the sun get up, but he saw it every day.  In the long afternoons when it was hot, and we make the rooms cool and dark, and rest with a book, he was working, working like a friendless slave.  And at night, when the moon rises, and we sit and watch it, and wonder, and remember all the battles that were ever won and lost, and all the songs that ever were sung, he could only stumble to his own poor corner, and sleep, and sleep, with a hot and heavy heart, and the blisters on his poor, poor hands!”

Major Churchill sank back in his chair and stared at his niece.  “Good God, child! whose words are you using?”

“Jacqueline’s,” answered Deb, staring in her turn.  “Jacqueline told it to me just that way, one hot night when I could not sleep, and there was heat lightning, and she took me in her lap and we sat by the window.  Are you tired, Uncle Edward?  Does your arm hurt?  Suppose I finish the story to-morrow?”

“No, I’m not tired,” said Uncle Edward.  “Finish it now.”

“The boy,” went on Deb, using now her own and now Jacqueline’s remembered words,—­“the boy did not want to work all his life long in the tobacco-fields, working from morning to night, with his hands, at the thing he hated.  He wanted books, he wanted to learn, and to work with his mind in the world beyond the Three-Notched Road.  The older he grew the more he wanted it.  And Jacqueline said that the mind finds a way, and that the boy got books together, and he studied hard.  You see, Jacqueline knows, for when she was a little girl, she used to stay sometimes with Cousin Jane Selden on the Three-Notched Road.  And Cousin Jane Selden’s farm was next to where the boy lived.  There was just a little stream between them.  There were no children at Cousin Jane Selden’s, and Jacqueline was lonely.  And she used to sit under the apple tree on the bank of the little stream and send chip boats down it, just as Miranda and I do.  Only she didn’t have Miranda, and she was all by herself.  And she could see the boy working on the other side of the stream, and there wasn’t any shade in the tobacco-field, and Jacqueline was so sorry for him.  And one day he came down to the stream for water and they talked to each other.  And Jacqueline told Cousin Jane Selden, and Cousin Jane Selden did not mind.  She said she was sorry for the boy, and that she had given his father a piece of her mind,—­only he wouldn’t take it.  So Jacqueline used to see the boy often and often, for she always played under the apple tree by the stream, and he had a little time to rest every day at noon, and he would come down to the shade on his side of the stream, and Jacqueline told him all