It was at the close of that very second day on which Ralph had achieved his first victory over the school, and in which Mirandy had been seized with her desperate passion for him, that she told him about it.  Not in words.  We do not allow that in the most civilized countries, and still less would it be tolerated in Hoopole County.  But Mirandy told the master the fact that she was in love with him, though no word passed her lips.  She walked by him from school.  She cast at him what are commonly called sheep’s-eyes.  Ralph thought them more like calf’s eyes.  She changed the whole tone of her voice.  She whined ordinarily.  Now she whimpered.  And so by ogling him, by blushing at him, by tittering at him, by giggling at him, by snickering at him, by simpering at him, by making herself tenfold more a fool even than nature had made her, she managed to convey to the dismayed soul of the young teacher the frightful intelligence that he was loved by the richest, the ugliest, the silliest, the coarsest, and the most entirely contemptible girl in Flat Creek district.

Ralph sat by the fire the next morning trying to read a few minutes before school-time, while the boys were doing the chores and the bound girl was milking the cows, with no one in the room but the old woman.  She was generally as silent as Bud, but now she seemed for some unaccountable reason disposed to talk.  She had sat down on the broad hearth to have her usual morning smoke; the poplar table, adorned by no cloth, stood in the middle of the floor; the unwashed blue teacups sat in the unwashed blue saucers; the unwashed blue plates kept company with the begrimed blue pitcher.  The dirty skillets by the fire were kept in countenance by the dirtier pots, and the ashes were drifted and strewn over the hearth-stones in a most picturesque way.

“You see,” said the old woman, knocking the residuum from her cob pipe, and chafing some dry leaf between her withered hands preparatory to filling it again, “you see, Mr. Hartsook, my ole man’s purty well along in the world.  He’s got a right smart lot of this world’s plunder[11], one way and another.”  And while she stuffed the tobacco into her pipe Ralph wondered why she should mention it to him.  “You see, we moved in here nigh upon twenty-five years ago.  ’Twas when my Jack, him as died afore Bud was born, was a baby.  Bud’ll be twenty-one the fif’ of next June.”

Here Mrs. Means stopped to rake a live coal out of the fire with her skinny finger, and then to carry it in her skinny palm to the bowl—­or to the hole—­of her cob pipe.  When she got the smoke a-going, she proceeded: 

“You see, this yere bottom land was all Congress land[12] in them there days, and it sold for a dollar and a quarter, and I says to my ole man, ‘Jack,’ says I, ‘Jack, do you git a plenty while you’re a-gittin’.  Git a plenty while you’re a-gittin’,’ says I, ’fer ’twon’t never be no cheaper’n ‘tis now,’ and it ha’n’t been; I knowed ’twouldn’t,”