Sam had not planted them—­you may be sure of that.  Mrs. Motherwell would tell you of an English girl she had had to work for her that summer who had brought the seed with her from England, and of how one day when she sent the girl to weed the onions, she had found her blubbering and crying over what looked to Mrs. Motherwell nothing more than weeds.  The girl then told her she had brought the seed with her and planted it there.  She was the craziest thing, this Polly Bragg.  She went every night to see them because they were like a “bit of home,” she said.  Mrs. Motherwell would tell you just what a ridiculous creature she was!

“I never see the beat o’ that girl,” Mrs. Motherwell would say.  “Them eyes of hers were always red with homesickness, and there was no reason for it in the world, her gettin’ more wages than she ever got before, and more’n she was earnin’, as I often told her.  Land! the way that girl would sing when she had got a letter from home, the queerest songs ye ever heard: 

   Down by the biller there grew a green willer,
   Weeping all night with the bank for a piller.

Well, I had to stop her at last,” Mrs. Motherwell would tell you with an apologetic swallow, which showed that even generous people have to be firm sometimes in the discharge of unpleasant duties.

“And, mind you,” Mrs. Motherwell would go on, with a grieved air, “just as the busy time came on didn’t she up and take the fever—­you never can depend on them English girls—­and when the doctor was outside there in the buggy waitin’ for her—­he took her to the hospital—­I declare if we didn’t find her blubberin’ over them poppies, and not a flower on them no mor’n nothing.”

Sam Motherwell and his wife were nominally Presbyterians.  At the time that the Millford Presbyterian Church was built Sam had given twenty-five dollars toward it, the money having been secured in some strange way by the wiles of Purvis Thomas, the collector.  Everybody was surprised at Sam’s prodigality.  The next year, a new collector—­for Purvis Thomas had gone away—­called on Mr. Motherwell.

The grain was just beginning to show a slight tinge of gold.  It was one of those cloudless sunshiny days in the beginning of August, when a faint blue haze lies on the Tiger Hills, and the joy of being alive swells in the breast of every living thing.  The creek, swollen with the July rain, ran full in its narrow channel, sparkling and swirling over its gravelly bed, and on the green meadow below the house a herd of shorthorns contentedly cropped the tender after-grass.

In the farmyard a gigantic turkey-gobbler marched majestically with arched neck and spreading wings, feeling himself very much the king of the castle; good-natured ducks puddled contentedly in a trough of dirty water; pigeons, white winged and graceful, circled and wheeled in the sunshine; querulous-voiced hens strutted and scratched, and gossiped openly of mysterious nests hidden away.