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[Mary Noailles Murfree, known in literature as Charles Egbert Craddock, was born near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1850. Being left slightly lame from a stroke of paralysis when a child, she devoted herself largely to reading and study. For many years she spent her summers in the mountains of East Tennessee, and thus she became familiar with the material that appears in her stories—the beauty of the mountains and the primitive life of the mountaineers. In 1884 she collected her earliest stories into a volume entitled "In the Tennessee Mountains." This has been followed by other volumes about the mountaineers, novels of life in other sections of the South, and various magazine articles. For a number of years after the war the Murfree family lived in St. Louis, returning in 1890 to Murfreesboro, which has since been the novelist's home.]

 

The breeze freshened, after the sun went down, and the hop and gourd vines were all astir as they clung about the little porch where Clarsie was sitting now, idle at last. The rainclouds had disappeared, and there bent over the dark, heavily wooded ridges a pale blue sky, with here and there the crystalline sparkle of a star. A halo was shimmering in the east,