By that time it was May.

All the girls had bright summer dresses and presently there were summer hats, some of them trimmed with flowers and some with ribbons. Ellen’s hat had daisies about the crown, and she could feel the flowers softly moving when she walked, making a dry rumbling clatter in her ears, or tossing in a storm when she ran, beating against the hat brim. She saw them in a storm when Jonas or Elmer jerked the hat away and held it high overhead, fending himself from her clamour with feet and arms. The girls liked to try on one another’s hats, borrowing graces from one another for the moment or testing, each, her own charms under the scrutiny of alien ribbons and hat brims. All together they walked along the road toward Gowan’s gate in the Sunday afternoons, or they walked the long way to Fairhope churchyard and rested awhile among the stones, reading the stones. All together, Jonas, Rosie, Eli, Dorine, Sebe, Maggie, Erastus, and Ellen, they would join hands and run down MacMurtrie’s hill, and once Ellen read the fortunes in their palms, giving the boys riches in the form of farms and crops and fine horses, or making this one a lawyer or a doctor as a supreme behest, and giving each boy or girl a long and happy life as his natural desert. Then Dorine brought back her hand, greedy for more, ‘See if you can find out who I am a-goen to marry.’ And Ellen, ‘Ten cents more and I’ll read the other palm for you, Lady, only one dime, ten cents,’ and ran hand in hand with Elmer down the pasture singing, ‘A-walken, a-talken, a-walken goes I,’ and all the troop came after. Sundays were fragrant days, filled from morning until sundown with the bright dress and the flowered hat.

Ellen went up to the tobacco field, a new field this year, behind the pasture and lying out toward the west and the north, and there she dropped the plants for Henry and John Bradshaw, or hoed the young crop, her mind reaching out over the hills and hollows with a new know ledge of the land, out over the farms and woods and creek bottoms, Squire Dorsey’s and Gowan’s and MacMurtrie’s and those lying further, until she pushed her task quickly and smiled to herself or sang, or lifted her back from its bow over the clods to look at the crows or the plovers or the bees as they flew over, for to them there were no farm lines, and all the land reached out and away as one portion, hills and hollows and sparse woodlands. Elmer and Eli were shearing the sheep in MacMurtrie’s barnlot with Uncle Ben to help and Scott MacMurtrie tying up the fleeces in bundles or crowding them into great hempen sacks. Elmer and Eli would catch the great padded bucks and ewes in their arms and slit the fleece away with great shears and peel back the rich fat wool, turning into the pasture the gaunt fleeced ewes and bucks that wobbled unsteadily on their feet and stared curiously at their own ugly shadows. Then Elmer and Jonas and Sebe and Eli were ploughing the corn, Elmer in the high field on Gowan’s hill and Eli on the rolling slope that edged away from the marsh and spread back in dark undulations to the foot of the wooded hill where the MacMurtries hunted foxes, and Jonas was driving the ploughshare up and down Marion’s corn rows in the far lonely field behind Gulliver’s creek, singing loud as he turned the plough at the corners, hearing his echoes as they called down from the rock-cliff in hollow, further-going blurs of flattened song. Or Dorine gathered berries from the pasture briars and pressed them into a red juice that flowed over her fingers and fell in great red globules into the bowl.