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 the girls, Uncle Ezra, and the farm hands. She was always nosing out all sorts of small, neglected matters and calling them to the attention of the neglecter.

"Ezry, don't you fergit to fix that garden fence this mornin'," she would shout into Uncle Ezra's ear at breakfast. "The hens is a-gittin' in an' a-eatin' into the hearts of all my beets."

"An' Judy, don't fail to coop up all the settin' hens when you gather up the eggs. I don't want to raise no more chicks this year. What with the price of eggs so low it don't hardly pay to feed hens." She sighed heavily. Any mention of money loss, real or fancied, always brought this sigh to her lips.

When she was not busy directing the other members of the household, she read the "Country Gentleman," whose rosy tales of phenomenal success on the farm excited her interest and envy, made log cabin blocks for bedquilts or cut and sewed carpet rags. She already had carpets enough to keep the whole house thoroughly padded for at least a quarter century, but she could not bear to see the rags go to waste.

She was one of the few remaining members of the old "first families" of Kentucky. Her haughty aquiline nose, broad brow and penetrating eyes showed that she had intellect and breeding. In the old days, several decades before the Civil War, her father had purchased hundreds of acres in Scott County for twenty-five cents an acre. He cleared the land, realized about a hundred dollars an acre out of the timber and still possessed his hundreds of acres of fine clay loam, virgin soil, only needing the seed to produce enormous crops of almost anything. So he became rich and built this leisurely white mansion. The war brought disaster and poverty. Aunt Eppie's father was one of the few landed proprietors who did not move away but remained to begin life over again as a poor farmer. In the school of penury, Aunt Eppie, applying her superior intellect and energy, proved to be all too apt a scholar. She learned not only to be saving but to be niggardly and penurious.

Uncle Ezra had been one of Aunt Eppie's father's hired