In the yard Sarah was directing a negro boy, who was spreading a second layer of manure over her more delicate plants.  As Abel closed the gate, she looked up, and the expression of his face held her eyes while he came toward her.

“What has happened, Abel?  You look like Moses when he came down from the mountain.”

“It was all wrong—­what I told you last night, mother.  Molly is going to marry me.”

“You mean she’s gone an’ changed her mind jest as you’d begun to git along without her.  I declar’, I don’t know what has got into you to show so little sperit.  If you were the man I took you to be, you’d up an’ let her see quick enough that you don’t ax twice in the same quarter.”

“Oh, all that’s over now—­she’s going to marry me.”

“You needn’t shout so.  I ain’t deaf.  Samson, sprinkle another spadeful of manure on that bridal-wreath bush over thar by the porch.”

“Won’t you say you’re pleased?”

“I ain’t pleased, Abel, an’ I ain’t going to lie about it.  When I git down on my knees to-night, I’ll pray harder than I ever prayed in my life that you’ll come to yo’ senses an’ see what a laughing-stock that gal has made of you.”

“Then I wish I hadn’t told you.”

“Well, I’d have knowed it anyhow—­it’s burstin’ out of you.  Where’re you goin’ now?  The time’s gittin’ on toward dinner.”

“For my axe.  I want to cut a little timber.”

“What on earth are you goin’ to cut timber at this hour for?”

“Oh, I feel like it, that’s all.  I want to try my strength.”

Going into the kitchen, he came out a minute later with his axe on his shoulder.  As he crossed the log over the mill-stream, the spotted fox-hound puppy waddled after him, and several startled rabbits peered out from a clump of sassafras by the “worm” fence.  Over the fence went Abel, and under it, on his fat little belly, went Moses, the puppy.  In the meadow the life-everlasting shed a fragrant pollen in the sunshine, and a few crippled grasshoppers deluded themselves into the belief that the summer still lingered.  Once the puppy tripped over a love-vine, and getting his front paws painfully entangled yelped sharply for assistance.  Picking him up, Abel carried him in his arms to the pine wood, where he place him on a bed of needles in a hollow.

Through the slender boles of the trees, the sunlight fell in bars on the carpet of pine-cones.  The scent of the living forest was in his nostrils, and when he threw back his head, it seemed to him that the blue sky was resting upon the tree-tops.  Taking off his coat, he felt the edge of his blade, while he leaned against the great pine he had marked out for sacrifice.  In the midst of the wood he saw the walls of his house rising—­saw the sun on the threshold—­the smoke mount from the chimney.  The dream in his brain was the dream of the race in its beginning—­for he saw the home and in the centre of the home he saw a woman and in the arms of the woman he saw a child.  Though the man would change, the dream was indestructible, and would flow on from the future into the future.  The end it served was not individual, but racial—­for it belonged not to the soul of the lover, but to the integral structure of life.