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 forefathers 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.

[Illustration:  “She’s our mother,” he said]

“She’s our Mother,” he said, as he flung back the long lock from across his forehead and stretched out his strong arm and slender hand towards the sun that was dropping fast down to the rim of Old Harpeth.  “She has bared her breasts to suckle us, covered us from sun and snow, and now she expects something from us.  If she has built us strong and ready, then we are to answer when the world has need of us and her storehouses and mines.  We are to give out her invitations and welcome all who are hungry and who come a-seeking.  Gentlemen, her wealth and her fertility are yours—­and her beauty!”

For a long, long minute every face in the assembly was turned to the setting sun, and a perfect glory rose from the valley and burned the call of its grandeur into their eyes.  We seemed to be looking across fields and forests and streams to the dim purple hills that might be the ramparts of the Holy City itself, while just below us lay the little quiet village of the dead whose souls must just have gone before.

And after that everybody rose with one accord and began to hurry to start out upon the long roads homeward, just as the great yellow moon rose in the east to balance the red old sun that was sinking in the west.  Only the Magnate sat still in his place for several long minutes looking out across to Old Harpeth, and I wondered whether he was thinking about the Eternal City or how many rails it was going to take to span the valley at his feet.