And then, being a person whose imagination dealt with the obvious, he undressed, blew out the light, and fell peacefully asleep to the dropping of acorns.

CHAPTER IV

THE REVERCOMBS

On the morning after the meeting at Bottom’s Ordinary, Abel Revercomb came out on the porch of the little house in which he lived, and looked across the steep rocky road to the mill-race which ran above a silver stream known as Sycamore Creek.  The grist-mill, a primitive log building, worked after ancient methods, had stood for a hundred years or more beside a crooked sycamore tree, which grew mid-way of the stream and shaded the wheel and the shingled roof from the blue sky above.  The old wooden race, on which the young green mosses shone like a coating of fresh paint on a faded surface, ran for a short distance over the brook, where the broad yellow leaves drifted down to the deep pond below.  Across the slippery poplar log, which divided the mill from the road and the house occupied by the miller, there was a stretch of good corn land, where the corn stood in shocks after the harvest, and beyond this the feathery bloom of the broomsedge ran to the luminous band of marshes on the far horizon.

From the open door before which the miller was standing, there came the clatter of breakfast dishes and the sound of Scripture text quoted in the voice of his mother.  Above his head several strings of red pepper hung drying, and these rustled in the wind with a grating noise that seemed an accompaniment to the speaker in the kitchen.

“The Lord said that, an’ I reckon He knew His own mind when He was speakin’ it,” remarked Sarah Revercomb as she put down the coffeepot.

“I declare there’s mother at it again,” observed Abel to himself with a frown—­for it was Sarah’s fate that an excess of virtue should have wrought all the evil of a positive vice.  From the days of her infancy, when she had displayed in the cradle a power of self-denial at which her pastor had marvelled, she had continued to sacrifice her inclinations in a manner which had rendered unendurable the lives around her.  Her parents had succumbed to it; her husband had died of it; her children had resigned themselves to it or rebelled against it according to the quality of their moral fibre.  All her life she had laboured to make people happy, and the result of this exalted determination was a cowed and resentful family.

“Yo’ buckwheat cakes will be stone cold if you don’t come along in, Abel,” she called now from the kitchen.  “You’ve been lookin’ kind of sallow these last days, so I’ve got a spoonful of molasses and sulphur laid right by yo’ plate.”

“For heaven’s sake, take it away,” he retorted irritably.  “I don’t need it.”

“I reckon I can tell by the look of you better than you can by the feelin’,” rejoined Sarah grimly, “an’ if you know what’s good for you, you’ll come and swallow it right down.”