[Illustration:  The Byrd was attired in miniatures of Sam’s overalls]

“It looks good enough to eat,” I answered, with a queer dirt enthusiasm rising in me that I had never even heard of one’s having before.

“Yes, and you will eat it in about four months’ time in the form of roasting ears,” answered Sam, smacking his lips, which had a streak of the mud delicacy across them at right angles.  “But go on up and tell Mammy to put your name in her dinner-pot and buy the Byrd to get you anything you need or want to the half of our kingdom.  I’ll be there in ten shakes of the mule’s tail.”

The road that leads from the cedar-pole gate through Sam’s wilderness up to the farm-house curves in and out and around the hill past as many lovely spots as my enthusiasm could endure.  Halfway up, there is a glimpse past a gray old tree with crimson thorns, of the valley with Old Harpeth looming opposite.  Further on a rocky old road leads down around a clump of age-distorted cedar-trees to the moss-greened stone spring-house, from which the water gurgles and pours past Sam’s huge earthern crocks of milk.  Over it all broods the low white house on the plateau, from under whose wings I found one small blue chicken running and cheeping wildly for a ride up the hill.

The Byrd was, as usual, attired in miniatures of Sam’s overalls, and his red mop stood on ends all over his head, while his freckles shone forth resplendently from the excitement of my arrival.

“Say, Betty, what you think?  Old Buttercup found a calf out in the woods and it has got a white nose and two spots.  Sam wanted to name it Chubb for the doctor that saved its life ’fore it got borned, but I said ladies first, and I calls it Betty.  You can let it lick your fingers if Sam milks on ’em first.  And Dominick have hatched ’fore the white hen—­eleven, and one what Sam calls a half chicken, because he don’t see how it is black when the eggs was bought thoroughbreds; but Mammy says because they is Yankee eggs.  Come see all everything.”

Sam’s barn is an old tumble-down collection of sheds and the most lovely place I ever got into.  It is running over with new-born life, and you can get an armful of first one variety and then another.  I liked the collie puppies best, but the Byrd was crazy about the little fawn calf which old Buttercup is so proud of that she switches her tail in the greatest complacency.  He was just showing me how to tempt her little white nose with a wisp of hay that she was learning to eat, and I was luxuriating with one new-born wriggler in my arms and two yellow-down puff-balls in my hand, when Sam and the mule came up from the field.

“My, it’s great to have a nice family party like this to plow for!” he said, as he led the mule into his stall and poured down his oats out of a bucket the Byrd ran to bring him.  “Any news from Petie, Bettykin?”