paring knife. Then the corn stood in the shocks and the big, yellow pumpkins lay scattered among the stubble, suggestive of plenty. The hickory nuts and black walnuts began to drop from the early frosts, the trees turned bronze and russet and scarlet and the warm air was full of bees and butterflies and other humming, buzzing, fluttering things. The tobacco fields lay brown and bare and deserted; but from the big tobacco barns there welled forth a fragrance that was for these Kentuckians, the soul of autumn. Oozing out into the golden sunshine from every crack in the great structures, it exhilarated like an elixir, like a long draught of some rich, spicy wine. The big doors, left open to allow a free current of air, showed the long, yellowish-brown bunches hanging thick-serried in the fragrant gloom.
It was an intoxication to her at this time to be alive, to gather and eat the good things that the earth so generously provided, to see the autumn glory of the woods and roadsides, to feel the glow of the sun, the warmth of the earth under her bare feet, and to sniff in the spicy exhalations of the great barns.
On these autumn days the sun sank early; and this was the time that the Pippinger children most enjoyed their play. There was something about the chilly drawing-in of these October twilights that made them want to leap and run and throw their arms about and utter wild, animal-like noises into the gathering night. Judith was always the leader in these games, and her wild abandon easily infected the others. Round and round the clothesline prop they would fly in the game of "Go in and out the Windows," and "The Farmer in the Dell," the long braids bobbing, the boys' shirttails, escaped from their overalls, flapping in the wind with the girls' petticoats. Then, tiring of this, there would be "Hide and Seek," "Tom, Tom, pull away," and the inexhaustible "Tag."
Minnie, the cat, liked these evenings too, and so did her kitten and the white cat that Judith had rescued from the Blackford boys. The cats, like the children, were filled with a spirit of kobold friskiness, as though their evening bowl of
