mother’s door, smiled and lifted her baby for one last embrace from his loving little uncle.

“I’m goin’ to grow a big man, an’ I’ll teach him to make pictures — big ones,” he called back.

“Yas, you’ll do a heap. You bettah watch out to be right good and peart; that’s what you bettah do.”

David, not unmindful of affairs on the far-away mountain side, made it quite worth the while of the two cousins to stay on with the widow and run the small farm under Cassandra’s directions, and she found herself fully occupied. She wrote David all the details: when and where things were planted — how the vines he had set on the hill slope were growing — how the pink rose he had brought from Hoke Belew’s