“Once there was a bear,
And he made his pasture there;
And he crept, and he crept, and he crept,
’Till he got away up there!”
“Gurgle—gurgle—gurgle!”
“And once there was a bear—”

This conversation took place between Azalea McBirney and Jonathan Summers one Sunday morning while Jonathan’s mother was at church. Azalea had been to Sunday-school, and had run over to ask her “Cousin” Barbara if she wouldn’t like to attend service to hear her husband preach. Barbara would—Oh, most undeniably she would. It was her firm conviction that if all men could hear her husband, and would give heed to what he said, they would be able to resist all temptations and would live in peace with the world. So she kissed Azalea and permitted her to button her into her pretty golden-brown frock, and then, clapping her large hat over her wayward hair and putting on her gloves as she hastened down the street, she was off, her heart beating high with loving pride of the man whose life was united with her own, and who had already found warm friends in his new parish.

Jonathan had been asleep when his mother left him, but it was not long before he opened his eyes and looked about him to see whom he could get to serve him. For Jonathan was, in his own opinion, the Prince of the World, and everyone in it was to do his bidding. He preferred, of course, his chief slave—the one called “Mamma”—and not seeing her, he opened his mouth and let out a more or less cheerful roar, not so much showing rage, as a healthful imitation of it.

Azalea was delighted. She picked him up, fed him his bottle, arranged him among the sofa pillows, and then, taking a dimpled hand in her own, she pointed delicately to the rosy palm.

“Once there was a bear,
And he made his pasture there.”

It must have been a particularly small bear to have pastured in such a tiny pink palm, but Jonathan saw nothing inconsistent in it, and remarked enthusiastically:“Gurgle—gurgle—gurgle.”

The bear began creeping slyly up Jonathan’s arm. It snuggled for a moment at his elbow, went on—and Jonathan shivered happily—up to his shoulder, and then settled right down in his neck, and seemed to think it a good place to stay. At least, Jonathan laughed delightedly.

Azalea looked at him with her soul in her eyes.

“Mercy me,” she sighed. “How well I understand kidnappers!”

Then she remembered that she had once been kidnapped herself, and that she had not liked it at all.

“Oh, Jonathan,” she cried, looking at him critically, “it seems impossible that anything as soft and lovely as you are can grow up to be just a hard, common, big man! If only I could put you in some kind of a preserve jar and keep you the way you are, I’d just give anything. Tired of sitting still? Well, come to Azalea, and we’ll go exploring. It’s a pretty house, isn’t it? But my goodness, you ought to have seen it a little while ago! It was as dull as Monday washday.

“Then, when it was decided that your papa and mamma were coming here to live, we all turned in and worked like sixty to make it look nice. Haystack Thompson—that’s the man that throws you up so high, you know—prepared it with his own hands. But you make up your mind we didn’t let him pick out the paper. Haystack is a dear, but he couldn’t be trusted to pick out wall paper. No, sir, my friends Carin and Annie Laurie and I did that. Brown for the sitting room, and green for the dining room, and pink and pale blue for the bedrooms.

“And we got these pretty print hangings and covers—at least, Mrs. Carson paid for them and we picked them out. And Ma McBirney wove these rugs—brown for the sitting room and green for the dining room. Aren’t they beauties? And Mr. Carson had the furniture done at his shop—the very best he could make. And Sam Disbrow, he brought this fern, and somebody else sent the palm, and Carin gave the pictures, and Annie Laurie made the table cover, and I don’t know what all. You see, some of these people don’t belong to your church at all, Jonathan. They just gave these things because you were so sweet that they couldn’t bear to have you come into any but a pretty house. Dear me, boy, stop pulling my hair! You treat me just as if I were a step-child. And I’m not. I’m your pretend cousin—which is ever and ever so much nicer than being a real cousin, because you do your own picking out.”

Jonathan replied after his own manner, and the morning wore on pleasantly. Azalea put the potatoes and the stew over to cook, and made some apple sauce. Then she set the table; and “toted” Jonathan some more. For once she forgot to think. The sad little thoughts that would mope around in the back of her mind, because she was, after all, a child without a father or a mother, kept entirely out of sight that morning. She was so busy that she could waste no time whatever on merely thinking; and the first thing she knew she saw the people pouring along the street from church.

Annie Laurie drove by with her aunts and her father, and waved to Azalea. Sam Disbrow walked by with his father, and Azalea thought what a dull time Sam had of it, with that heavy looking father with his hanging head and big, rolling eyes, both going home to a mother who was always sick, and to that queer sister of Sam’s, who had too much work to do, and who never seemed to want to talk with anybody. And then the Carson carriage rushed by with black Ben driving, and Mr. Carson, so handsome and straight, beside him, and Carin and Mrs. Carson on the back seat in their beautiful furs, smiling and bowing to everybody.

Then the McBirney wagon came, with Mr. and Mrs. Summers in with Pa and Ma McBirney and Jim. And Azalea was thanked and kissed, and had the pain of seeing Jonathan tear himself away from her to rush to his mother’s embrace, and then Azalea went out and got in with her foster parents, and Pa McBirney hissed to his horses in an odd way he had, and they started for their long drive up the mountain.

“It sure is a mighty curious thing how that man goes on, Mary,” said Mr. McBirney to his wife as they were driving by the prosperous dairy farm of Simeon Pace. “He’s jest rolling up money, but no one can tell what he does with it. Heller, the banker, he says nary a cent of it comes his way. Pace don’t believe in banks—got stung some time I reckon, and lost his nest egg by the busting of a bank. Anyhow, he hangs on to what he gets nowadays. It beats all to see anyone so old-fashioned. Heller says he supposes he hides it away in his old stocking or buries it in the yard. I suppose I’m something of a mossback myself, but anyway I know enough to bank my money when I get it—which ain’t any too often.”

“He don’t look like such an old-fashioned man, Simeon Pace don’t,” mused Mrs. McBirney. “He certainly does keep his place up right smart. Them cattle o’ his’n is the best to be seen in the country, and everything around the place is right up in G.”

“Well, old-fashioned he is, but he’s far-seeing too. About five years ago he bought the Caruth Valley and all the uplying land beyond it. I couldn’t see what his idea was, but now I hear that he’s selling it out to Mr. Carson for five times what he paid for it. Mr. Carson wants it for the water power on it. He’s adding to his factory, you see.”

“That will mean work for a good many more of us mountain folks,” observed Mrs. McBirney. “The way Mr. Carson has opened up things for us is just stirring to think about. I don’t know as his efforts are appreciated, but I, for one, know who I have to thank when I see the new things in the house and the good new clothes we’ve been able to get for the children. Why, only this morning I was calling Jim’s attention to it. ‘Look at you,’ I said, ‘in your store clothes and brown shoes and new overcoat and all. You look like a rich man’s son,’ says I. And I declare to goodness when I got out this here new cloak o’ mine, and this bonnet Mrs. Carson made for me out of silk velvet and a real ostrich tip, I could hardly believe it was me. I’m so used to wearing rusty black that I don’t know as I feel quite at home in good deep black like this a-here.”

Jim McBirney, who was sitting on the back seat with Azalea, not caring to listen longer to the conversation of his elders and knowing it was bad manners to disturb them, began whispering.

“I went to Sam Disbrow’s house last evening, sis.” When Jim said “evening” he meant afternoon.

“Did you, Jim? What was it like?”

“Shades all down—rooms all hot—Mrs. Disbrow lying on the settle—Hannah sitting by her, knitting and knitting, and her eyes so crossed you couldn’t think how she could do anything but cross stitch.”“I’m sorry for Hannah. That’s a dreadful life to lead—being shut up all the time with a sick person. I’ve a good mind to give her a party if mother will let me.”

“Give Hannah Disbrow a party? Why, she’d run like a hare if she saw anybody coming, and she’d drop her ice cream and go home crying. I know Hannah.”

He spoke as if he had made girls and their outlandish ways his particular study.

“Well, anyway, I’m going to see her. And I’ll get the other girls to go.”

“Oh, yes, th’ other girls! Why, Zalie, you can’t move around by your lone no more; you’re just hitched on to them friends of yours. Ain’t you ever going to have any separate thoughts again?”

Azalea laughed lightly, and at the chime of her merriment Mary McBirney turned around to look at the occupants of the rear seat. It was at such times that Azalea loved her most—when the light of love flooded her face with its high brow and soft eyes. It always made Azalea feel as if there must be a lamp burning there behind the kind face. She gave a pleasant, inarticulate murmur that served better than words to let the children know that her love was round about them. Then she turned back to resume her conversation with her husband, and the horses—nimble mountain-climbers—pulled on up the road steadily, stopping now and again to breathe, and then sweeping around another curve of the ever winding road.

Azalea amused herself by noticing the little plateaus or “benches” along the mountain side. She played a little game with herself, building imaginary houses in this cove or on that bench among the maples. There was one place in particular, where three lofty tulip trees guarded a spring of cold water, and where there was a little almost level cove from which one could look off for miles and miles along the purple valley, where she put first one sort of a house and then another.

When she began thinking of it, she built—in her mind of course—a little house of cedar logs, with an open chamber between, like the one she now called home; but as time went on she changed her plans. Barbara Summers had tried to persuade her that a rambling bungalow of pine, with high chimneys and wide porches would be the thing; and Carin had been in favor of a cement bungalow with a pergola with trumpet vines growing over it. Annie Laurie thought it would be better to have a tent pitched there, and to eat off wooden plates and use paper napkins.

“Then you could heave everything into the fire,” said this practical young woman, “and there’d be no dishes to wash.”

As they passed the place this Sunday Azalea asked Jim what kind of a house he thought it would be best to put up there, but Jim was not fond of playing at air castles.

“We-all don’t own the land,” he said, “and we ain’t got the money for the house, so what’s the use of talking?”

Azalea felt just a trifle out of patience.

“The use of talking,” she said rather sharply, “is that it interests you.”

“Keeping still interests me all right.”

“Keep still, then, if you want to. I’m sure I’ve plenty to think about.”

It was then that Mary McBirney began singing softly:

“‘Sweet are the hillsides, pleasant are the valleys,
Bright is the sky o’er the home of my heart.’”

Both Azalea and Jim knew very well why she was singing. She never could bear to reprove them; and she had a little theory that music could drive out any evil spirit. Such music as she made ought to, certainly, the children thought, sitting for a moment in silence, ashamed of their stupid quarrel. Neither one was of the sort to sulk. Jim gave a little twist on his seat, and joined in the fourth line:

“‘And my home, gentle friend, is wherever thou art.’”

Azalea loved the quaint old song. It was one of many such which Mary McBirney knew.

“I’d love to see the words and music of the songs you sing, mother,” Azalea had said to her once. “Where can I find them? Are they in any of the books you have?”

But Mary McBirney had shaken her head with a smile.

“The mountain folks have many a song that never yet has been writ down, child,” she said. “In the lonely nights in the little cabins away back on the mountains, all still and peaceful, the folks weave the songs out of their hearts. Grandmothers and mothers and daughters have sung them, and not one of them all had the knowledge to write them down. They make me think of wild roses. They grow beside the roadway, and they are the sweetest of them all.”

“‘Early in the morning I can hear the thrushes singing,’” Mary McBirney sang on, and Azalea, joining in, put all her love for the sweet woman into the words:

“‘Dear as the voice that I love best of all.’”

They stopped at the waterfall for the horses to drink. The cataract leaped down delicately and gayly from the height above, paused at the roadway, rippling along among the pebbles at the edges and rushing between the great boulders in the center of the ford, and then with a wild laugh plunged off over the edge and foamed down the mountain side. The sky was rather overcast on this particular day, and the trees wore a patient look; even the waterfall seemed subdued, and its rush of sound was more liquid and less like music than on brighter days. A heaviness and quietude lay over everything. But the McBirneys loved the mountain in all its moods, and little by little they set themselves to fit in with its whims, so that by the time they reached their home they were quiet, too.

But they were happy—Oh, most distinctly, they were that. They loved every inch of the old place. The cabin of logs, divided in the center with an open air chamber, the little loft where Azalea slept, looking up the mountain side, the Pride of India tree beneath which lay the graves of little Molly McBirney and of Azalea’s poor mother, the tulip trees at the outlook, the little smithy, the stable, the barn, the smoke house, the corn crib, the chicken house and the bee hives, the pigeon coops and the swinging gourds where the martins nested, all were dear to them. Vines, flowers, and bushes grew all about them. The farm slanted down the hillside at a dangerous angle, but contrived to soak into its produce the sweet Southern sun, and it gave of its rich bounty in return for Thomas McBirney’s hard toil.

Human care and enthusiasm showed in every foot of it. Even the most casual passer-by could see at a glance that here was a home in which people lived who loved life and each other.

“Happy and good folk live here,” it seemed to say.

And there were, first and last, a good many to read its message, for it was on the highway and whoever came over Tennyson Mountain down to Lee must pass almost through the doorway.

This gray, pleasant Sunday, Mrs. McBirney and Azalea jumped from the wagon at the house door, and Jim and his father went on to the stable to look after the horses. The cow was munching contentedly in her stall, but the chickens seemed a little depressed and in need of their midday drink of hot water and their feeding of hot meal. The pigeons cooed chillily from their cote. As for the horses, they knew almost as much about unhitching as their betters, and if either Jim or Mr. McBirney had done anything they ought not to have done they would have turned their critical eyes upon them. The real pride of Jim’s heart, however, was the two ponies which he and Azalea rode to school. They had been the gift of Mr. Carson to them, and they were the brothers of Carin’s pony, Mustard, and bore the exciting names of Pepper and Paprika.

Jim lingered for a moment or two, loath to leave them. He loved the velvet noses of them the friendly eyes and the warm heaving sides. They muzzled him, and he put their noses in his neck and gave them to understand that their affection was returned. The cool, damp air billowing in at the door was delicious, and he almost hated to go in the house.

“What’s the use in living in houses?” he thought. He had known a young fellow who traveled over the mountains all the time with two ponies. One he rode, the other carried his pack which consisted of a hammock, a frying pan, some blankets and a square of canvas, out of which he could, at need, fashion a sort of tent. He never had slept under a roof since he was a baby. Jim thought of this boy as a very fortunate fellow. He chose not to remember the desperate ill health that had driven the lad into the life. However, he must go in the house, he must! Ma had got the fire going in the kitchen, judging from the smoke that rolled from the chimney. Well, he was glad he didn’t have to build it. He didn’t feel like doing anything just then—except, perhaps, sitting by the door and looking off at the valley. Usually when he wanted to do this, some one straightway thought of some chore for him. So he slid softly onto the bench, sitting where he could be seen neither from the door nor the window, and fell into a comfortable though somewhat hungry day dream.Meantime, odors of frying chicken were wafted to him, along with the smell of slightly burned corn cake and very good coffee. The odors grew stronger and pleasanter and after a time Jim decided that he wasn’t doing right to stay outside while everyone was working in the house. It really was his duty to go in. So in he went. The fire was leaping, the table was set, his mother was bustling around in her calico dress, Azalea was putting the chairs to the table, and his father looked ready primed for a long Sunday grace.

It proved to be even longer than Jim had feared. Thomas McBirney was one of those who count it a fault if they neglect to mention every event of their lives to the Almighty. He thanked the Lord for their united family, for food and fire, for roof and friends, for the privilege of attending divine service, and for the love of God which warmed their hearts. Meantime his son’s eyes wandered restlessly from the heaped plate of chicken to the bowl of gravy and “fixin’s.” He wondered if he would have no more than a “drumstick” and why there should be such intimate relations between boys and drumsticks. The world over, fathers seemed to think they should go to their sons. No doubt Chinese fathers held just the same opinion.

Imagine then, his surprise—his unbelieving surprise—when his father, having first served his mother and Azalea, took the “wish-bone,” beautifully burdened with tender white meat and laid it on Jim’s plate.

“For a good boy,” he said, as he heaped on the potatoes and gravy, and passed the corn bread. “Once in a while, Jim, we men folks have to set ourselves against these here women, eh? Them with their wishbones! Who said they was to eternally have the wishbones? No king that ever I hearn tell of. I say, let’s head a revolution and declare that they ken have only every other wishbone. That’s fair, ain’t it?”

A nice, warm feeling gathered in Jim’s heart. It was splendid to have a dad like that—a dad who could tell what was going on in a fellow’s mind. And his mother and Azalea seemed to be glad he had the wishbone, too. They were looking at him just the way a fellow likes to have his family look at him. My, what a nice day Sunday was! And wasn’t he glad he had helped haul those hickory logs! And wasn’t the room nice, with the settle there next the fire, and the old clock tickin’, tickin’ away, and striking now and then with a voice like Haystack Thompson’s when he led in prayer. And there was a white table cloth on for Sunday, and Ma was smiling almost the way she used before Molly died. And the cat was stretching herself, and outside, Peter, the hound, was sniffling to let them know he was there and hadn’t had his dinner yet.

“Goodness gracious,” sighed Jim, “ain’t it lucky we’re all alive!”