Where the limestone came to an end the dolomite stones were hard like flint, the pebbles round and smooth. Sometimes these great stones were laid upon each other in even seams, and they stood, tall and brown, as cliffs topping the hills, the walls hanging straight downward, the stones great beyond all power of man to lift. Often as Ellen came and went among the hills the dignity of the great stones would pass into her being as she walked by them, and it added itself to her pride in being able to surmount them, to walk beyond them. Or, digging into the dust of the garden, bent over the herbs, she would remember the encroaching pebbles and flat rocks or the geese plucking at the thin grass. She would remember Regina’s step on the stony road and Bell’s two eggs in the tin cup. Two days after the skunk visited the chicken pens she worked in the garden toward the late afternoon, remembering the cedar shrubs that grew scantily over the slanting wastelands and pastures. The next year she would grow a large onion patch, she decided, and she rose from her hoe to look about on the garden, to scan its length, deciding then how great the onion bed should be. The huckster had told her that there was a good market for early onions, that he would buy all she could furnish. Into her decision about the onions came her dreaming half-knowledge, surging up from beneath, allied to the hoe in the clods, running with the slipping of the blade. Pius Donahue looked at her avidly with his watery eyes and Leona Hendrahan lay with Joe Lucas in a fence corner, it was said in whisper. The corn was scanty and thin and the tobacco stunted. If Jasper should look at Susie Whelen he would see that she had a kind of prettiness and he would want her in his house and in his arms. She would therefore hate Susie Whelen and she would hate the look of her eyes and the curves of her mouth, and hate the trees about her farm and the flowers in her yard. She would distrust her flowered dress and her bright pin on her bosom. The eggs in the basket were few and the nests, searched daily, were barren. Dreamily it came to her that she would take what there was out of the hard soil and out of the stones and she would have, in the end, something from the clattering rocks.