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 Then over to Jim Townsend, the blacksmith, to get some plate shoes in case a neighbor should come with a job of horseshoeing to do. Once Jim looked admiringly at Judith, whom he was really seeing for the first time, although she had been there dozens of times before.

"You got a handsome gal there, Bill," he said.

"All my gals is handsome," answered Bill complacently. "But this one here is more a boy'n a gal. She's her dad's hired hand, she is. She helps me shoe the mules, she does."

"Waal, waal, so she's a blacksmith's helper! I'm needin' a hand. Wouldn't ye like to stay here an' help me shoe hosses, eh, little gal?"

Judith looked him through and through and made no reply.

"Dad, do folks really want other folks' chillun to come an' live with 'em?" she asked her father, when they were back in the wagon.

"No, Judy, I can't say they do," Bill answered. "Other folks' young uns is gener'ly wanted 'bout as much as other folks' ailments."

"Then why do they keep a-askin' me to come an' live with 'em?"

"Oh, I dunno. It's jes a way they have. They done like that when I was a lad too."

"I wish they wouldn't," said Judith.

Then, as they drove back home through the sleepy heat of the noonday, Judith would grow hungrier and hungrier and her one thought would be of dinner. She could smell it as soon as they pulled up in the barnyard: boiled hog meat and mustard greens and young beets and potatoes. How good it tasted when at last she had a heaping plateful in front of her with a generous tin mug of cool skim milk to wash it down!

Judith liked best of all the autumn season, when the sky was a hazy, tender blue and the mellow sunshine lay like a film of golden tissue over all the earth. Then there were plenty of apples to munch; and she could go out into the garden and pick the big, red, juicy tomatoes and eat them alive, as it were, before they had been slaughtered by her mother's