CHAPTER IX.
MATTERS IN KENTUCKY Backward now with our reader we turn, and take up the broken thread of our story at the point where we left Adah Hastings.
It was a bitter morning in which to face the fierce north wind, and plow one's way to the Derby cornfield, where, in a small, dilapidated building, Aunt Eunice Reynolds, widowed sister of John Stanley, had lived for many years, first as a pensioner upon her brother's bounty, and next as Hugh's incumbent.

At the time of her brother's death Aunt Eunice had intended removing to Spring Bank, but when Hugh's mother wrote, asking for a home, she at once abandoned the plan, and for two seasons more lived alone, watching from her lonely door the tasseled corn ripening in the August sun.

Of all places in the world Hugh liked the cottage best, particularly in summer.

Few would object to it then with its garden of gayly colored flowers, its barricades of tasseled corn and the bubbling music of the brook, gushing from the willow spring a few rods from the door.

But in the winter people from the highway, as they caught from across the field the gleam of Aunt Eunice's light, pitied the lonely woman sitting there so solitary beside her wintry fire.