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At the gate in front of his farmhouse in the mountains Tom Drake received a letter froy

"That's all this ood corn and cotton in the bottoood, I reckon, if the drouth don't kill 'em," the farmer answered The carrier drove on, and Tom slowly opened his letter and turned toward the house He was a typical Georgia ed He wore no beard, had mild brown eyes, heavy chestnut hair upon which rested a shapeless wool hat full of holes His ar and deliberate He was in his shirt-sleeves; his patched jean trousers were too large at the waist, and were supported by a single ho tobacco, and as he went along he moved his stained lips in the audible pronunciation of the words he was reading

His wife, Lucy, a slender woman, in a drab print dress with no sort of adornhtly knotted hair, stood on the porch i in the dooras her brother, John Webb, a red-haired, red-faced bachelor, fifty years of age, who also had his eyes on the approaching reader

"Another dun, I reckon," Mrs Drake said, tentatively, when her husband had paused at the bottolanced up from the sheet in his hand

"Not this tiround, and looked first at his wife and then at his brother-in-laith a broadening seneral run, but if I gave you a hundred trials--yes, three hundred--and all day to do it in, you wouldn't then come in a mile o' what's in this letter"

"I don't intend to try," Mrs Drake said, eagerly, "anyways not with all that ironin' to do that's piled up like a haystack on the dinin'- room table, to say nothin' of the beds and bed-clothes to be sunned You can keep your big secret as far as I'm concerned"

"It's another Confederate Veteran excursion to some tohisky is sold," said the bachelor, with a dry cackle "That's it no pensions froh fun once a year to make up for it"

Tolance of aain