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 moving over into Indiana, others of going to Cincinnati, though few had the courage or money to go beyond talk. There was much robbing of hen roosts and stables and a general and oft expressed feeling among the old folks that things were going from bad to worse.

With August the grasshoppers came in great numbers. Luke Wolf said it was the hard times that brought them. Grasshoppers and hard times, he declared, were never far apart. However they did little to make the times harder, as they could do but small damage to the crops. Tobacco they would not touch and corn was beyond their reach. They were a bit hard on alfalfa and garden stuff, but they made up for it by fattening the geese and turkeys.

It gave pleasure to Judith and delight to the children to tend and watch the little chicks and geese and turkeys as they grew into strong, stocky birds. And at sundown, when they all came up to the roosts, the yard was as crowded and busy as a town on fair day, noisy too with the crowing, quacking and gobbling of the young males who grew daily in self-importance. But as the fall came on and the young turkeys ranged further afield and found abundance of food and grasshoppers, they began to fail to come up for the evening scatter of corn, a tree in the woods often seeming to them a pleasanter roosting place than the barn roof. Judith did not like to have them roosting away from home. She knew that if any of the neighbors happened upon them they would disappear one by one.

Once, when she had not seen them for several days, she left the children with Aunt Selina in the late afternoon and started out to look for them. Loitering through the late glow of the September day she half forgot the turkeys in the pleasure that came to her from asters and goldenrod, red maples, and yellow beeches. Almost without thinking what she was doing she began to stray along the path that led in the direction of the old shanty between the hills.

When she came within sight of the deserted house, the roof of which was just visible above the rank growth surrounding it, she stood for a moment looking across the last red shafts