me--and work in yo'r shirtsleeves."

Courtland obediently flung aside his coat and followed his active
hostess through the French window to the platform outside. Above them a
wooden ledge or cornice, projecting several inches, ran the whole length
of the building. It was on this that Miss Sally had evidently found a
foothold while she was nailing up a trellis-work of laths between it and
the windows of the second floor. Courtland found the ladder, mounted
to the ledge, followed by the young girl, who smilingly waived his
proffered hand to help her up, and the two gravely set to work. But in
the intervals of hammering and tying up the vines Miss Sally's tongue
was not idle. Her talk was as fresh, as quaint, as original as herself,
and yet so practical and to the purpose of Courtland's visit as to
excuse his delight in it and her own fascinating propinquity. Whether
she stopped to take a nail from between her pretty lips when she spoke
to him, or whether holding on perilously with one hand to the trellis
while she gesticulated with the hammer, pointing out the divisions of
the plantation from her coign of vantage, he thought she was as clear
and convincing to his intellect as she was distracting to his senses.

She told him how the war had broken up their old home in Pineville,
sending her father to serve in the Confederate councils of Richmond,
and leaving her aunt and herself to manage the property alone; how the
estate had been devastated, the house destroyed, and how they had
barely time to remove a few valuables; how, although SHE had always been
opposed to secession and the war, she had not gone North, preferring to
stay with her people, and take with them the punishment of the folly she
had foreseen. How after the war and her father's death she and her aunt
had determined to "reconstruct THEMSELVES" after their own fashion on
this bit of property, which had survived their fortunes because it had