Asa Holmes
or
At the Cross-roads

Works of
Annie Fellows Johnston

The Little Colonel Series
(Trade Mark, Reg. U. S. Pat. Of.)
Each one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated

L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
200 Summer Street Boston, Mass.

Copyright, 1900, 1901
By E. S. Barnett
——————
Copyright, 1902
By L. C. Page and Company
(INCORPORATED)
——————
All rights reserved
Seventh Impression
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.

TO
A Dear Old Philosopher
WHOSE CHEERFUL OPTIMISM AND SUNNY FAITH HAVE
SWEETENED LIFE FOR ALL WHO KNOW HIM

Asa Holmes
or
At the Cross-roads

Chapter I

THERE is no place where men learn each other's little peculiarities more thoroughly than in the group usually to be found around the stove in a country store. Such acquaintance may be of slow growth, like the oak's, but it is just as sure. Each year is bound to add another ring to one's knowledge of his neighbours if he lounges with them, as man and boy, through the Saturday afternoons of a score of winters.

A boy learns more there than he can be taught in schools. It may be he is only a tow-headed, freckle-faced little fellow of eight when he rides over to the cross-roads store for the first time by himself. Too timid to push into the circle around the fire, he stands shivering on the outskirts, looking about him with the alertness of a scared rabbit, until the storekeeper fills his kerosene can and thrusts the weekly mail into his red mittens. Then some man covers him with confusion by informing the crowd that "that little chap is Perkins's oldest," and he scurries away out of the embarrassing focus of the public eye.

But the next time he is sent on the family errands he stays longer and carries away more. Perched on the counter, with his heels dangling over a nail keg, while he waits for the belated mail train, he hears for the first time how the government ought to be run, why it is that the country is going to the dogs, and what will make hens lay in cold weather. Added to this general information, he slowly gathers the belief that these men know everything in the world worth knowing, and that their decisions on any subject settle the matter for all time.

He may have cause to change his opinion later on, when his sapling acquaintance has gained larger girth; when he has loafed with them, smoked with them, swapped lies and spun yarns, argued through a decade of stormy election times, and talked threadbare every subject under the sun. But now, in his callow judgment, he is listening to the wit and wisdom of the nation. Now, as he looks around the overflowing room, where butter firkins crowd the calicoes and crockery, and where hams and saddles swing sociably from the same rafter, as far as his knowledge goes, this is the only store in the universe.

Some wonder rises in his childish brain as he counts the boxes of axle-grease and the rows of shining new pitchforks, as to where all the people live who are to use so many things. He has yet to learn that this one little store that is such a marvel to him is only a drop in the bucket, and that he may travel the width of the continent, meeting at nearly every mile-post that familiar mixture of odours—coal oil, mackerel, roasted coffee, and pickle brine. And a familiar group of men, discussing the same old subjects in the same old way, will greet him at every such booth he passes on his pilgrimage through Vanity Fair.

Probably in after years Perkins's oldest will never realise how much of his early education has been acquired at that Saturday afternoon loafing-place, but he will often find himself looking at things with the same squint with which he learned to view them through 'Squire Dobbs's short-sighted spectacles. Many a time he will find that he has been unconsciously warped by the prejudices he heard expressed there, and that his opinions of life in general and men in particular are the outgrowth of those early conversations which gave him the creed of his boyhood.

"Them blamed Yankees!" exclaims one of these neighbourhood orators, tilting his chair back against the counter, and taking a vicious bite at his plug of tobacco. "They don't know no better than to eat cold bread the year 'round!" And the boy, accepting the statement unquestioningly, stores away in his memory not only the remark, but all the weighty emphasis of disgust which accompanied the remark in the spitting of a mouthful of tobacco juice. Henceforth his idea of the menu north of the Mason and Dixon line is that it resembles the bill of fare of a penitentiary, and he feels that there is something coldblooded and peculiar about a people not brought up on a piping hot diet of hoe-cake and beaten biscuit.

In the same way the lad whose opinions are being moulded in some little corner grocery of a New England village, or out where the roads cross on the Western prairie, receives his prejudices. It may be years before he finds out for himself that the land of Boone is not fenced with whiskey jugs and feuds, and that the cap-sheaf on every shock of wheat in its domain is not a Winchester rifle.

But these prejudices, popular at local cross-roads, are only the side lines of which every section carries its own specialty. When it comes to staple articles, dear to the American heart and essential to its liberty and progress, their standard of value is the same the country over.

One useful lesson the youthful lounger may learn here, if he can learn it anywhere, and that is to be a shrewd reader of men and motives. Since staple characteristics in human nature are repeated everywhere, like staple dry goods and groceries, a thorough knowledge of the group around the stove will be a useful guide to Perkins's oldest in forming acquaintances later in life.

Long after he has left the little hamlet and grown gray with the experiences of the metropolis, he will run across some queer Dick whose familiar personality puzzles him. As he muses over his evening pipe, suddenly out of the smoke wreaths will spring the face of some old codger who aired his wisdom in the village store, and he will recognise the likeness between the two as quickly as he would between two cans of leaf lard bearing the same brand.

But Perkins's oldest is only in the primer of his cross-roads curriculum now, and these are some of the lessons he is learning as he edges up to the group around the fire. On the day before Thanksgiving, for instance, he was curled up on a box of soap behind the chair of old Asa Holmes—Miller Holmes everybody calls him, because for nearly half a century his water-mill ground out the grist of all that section of country. He is retired now; gave up his business to his grandsons. They carry it on in another place with steam and modern machinery, and he is laid on the shelf. But he isn't a back number, even if his old deserted mill is. It is his boast that now he has nothing else to do, he not only keeps up with the times, but ahead of them.

Everybody goes to him for advice; everybody looks up to him as they do to a hardy old forest tree that's lived through all sorts of hurricanes, but has stood to the last, sturdy of limb, and sound to the core. He is as sweet and mellow as a winter apple, ripened in the sun, and that's why everybody likes to have him around. You don't see many old men like that. Their troubles sour them.

Well, this day before Thanksgiving the old miller was in his usual place at the store, and as usual it was he who was giving the cheerful turn to the conversation. Some of the men were feeling sore over the recent election; some had not prospered as they had hoped with their crops, and were experiencing the pinch of hard times and sickness in their homes. Still there was a holiday feeling in the atmosphere. Frequent calls for nutmeg, and sage, and cinnamon, left the air spicy with prophecies of the morrow's dinner.

The farmers had settled down for a friendly talk, with the comfortable sense that the crops were harvested, the wood piled away for the winter, and a snug, warm shelter provided for the cattle. It was good to see the hard lines relax in the weather-beaten faces, in the warmth of that genial comradeship. Even the gruffest were beginning to thaw a little, when the door opened, and Bud Hines slouched in. The spirits of the crowd went down ten degrees.

Not that he said anything; only gave a gloomy nod by way of greeting as he dropped into a chair. But his whole appearance said it for him; spoke in the droop of his shoulders, and the droop of his hat brim, and the droop of his mouth at the corners. He looked as if he might have sat for the picture of the man in the "Biglow Papers," when he said:

"Sometimes my innard vane pints east for weeks together,
My natur' gits all goose-flesh, an' my sins
Come drizzlin' on my conscience sharp ez pins."

The miller greeted him with the twinkle in his eye that eighty years and more have never been able to dim; and Perkins's oldest had his first meeting with the man who always finds a screw loose in everything. Nothing was right with Bud Hines. One of his horses had gone lame, and his best heifer had foundered, and there was rust in his wheat. He didn't have any heart to keep Thanksgiving, and he didn't see how anybody else could, with the bottom dropped clean out of the markets and the new road tax so high. For his part he thought that everything was on its last legs, and it wouldn't be long till all the Powers were at war, and prices would go up till a poor man simply couldn't live.

It was impossible not to be affected more or less by his gloomy forebodings, and the old miller, looking around on the listening faces, saw them settling back in their old discouraged lines. Clasping his hands more firmly over the top of his cane, he exclaimed: "Now look here, Bud Hines, I'm going to give you a proverb that was made on purpose for such a poor, weak-kneed Mr. Ready-to-halt as you are: 'Never be discouraged, and never be a discourager!' If you can't live up to the first part, you certainly can to the second. No matter how hard things go with you, you've no right to run around throwing cold water on other people. What if your horse has gone lame? You've got a span of mules that can outpull my yoke of oxen any day. One heifer oughtn't to send a man into mourning the rest of his days, and it would be more fitting to be thankful over your good tobacco crop than to groan over the failure of your wheat. More fitting to the season. As for the rest of the things you're worrying over, why, man, they haven't happened yet, and maybe never will. My old grandad used to say to me when I was a lad, 'Never cross your bridge till you come to it, Asa,' and I've proved the wisdom of that saying many a time. Suppose'n you put that in your pipe and smoke it."

If Perkins's oldest learns no other lesson this year than to put those two proverbs into practice, he will have had a valuable education. How many Thanksgivings they will help to make for him! How many problems and perplexities they will solve!

"Never be discouraged; never be a discourager! Don't cross your bridge until you come to it!" It is a philosophy that will do away with half the ills which flesh imagines it is heir to.

Thanksgiving Day! How much more it means to the old miller than to the little fellow beside him on the soap box! To the child it is only a feast day; to the old man it is a festival that links him to a lifetime of sacred memories.

"Five and eighty years," he says, musingly, resting his chin on the wrinkled hands that clasp the head of his cane. A silence falls on the group around the stove, and through the cracked door the red firelight shines out on thoughtful faces.

"It's a long time; five and eighty years," he repeats, "and every one of them crowned with a Thanksgiving. Boys," lifting his head and looking around him, "you've got a good bit of pike to travel over yet before you get as far as I've gone, and some of you are already half fagged out and beginning to wonder if it's all worth while—Bud, here, for instance. I'd like to give you all a word of encouragement.

"Looking back, I can see that I've had as many ups and downs as any of you, and more than your share of work and trouble, for I've lived longer, and nearly all the years are marked with graves. Seems to me that lately I've had to leave a new grave behind me at every mile-stone, till now I'm jogging on all alone. Family gone, old neighbours gone, old friends—I'm the last of the old set. But, still, when all is said and done, I haven't lost heart, for 'I've lived, seen God's hand through a lifetime, and all was for best.'

"When I was milling down there on Bear Creek you'd 'a' thought I was a fool if I hadn't taken my rightful toll out of every bushel of grist that ran through my hopper, and sometimes I think that the Almighty must feel that way about us when we go on grinding and grinding, and never stopping to count up our share of the profit and pleasure and be thankful over it. I believe that no matter what life pours into our hopper, we are to grind some toll of good out of it for ourselves, and as long as a man does his part toward producing something for the world's good, some kind of bread for its various needs, he will never go hungry himself.

"And I believe more than that. You've heard people compare old age to a harvest field, and talk about the autumn of life with its ripened corn waiting for the reaper Death, and all that, and speak about the 'harvest home,' as if it were the glorious end of everything. But it never did strike me that way, boys. The best comes after the harvesting, when the wheat is turned into flour and the flour into bread, and the full, wholesome loaves go to make up blood and muscle and brain. That's giving it a sort of immortality, you might say, raising it into a higher order of life. And it's the same with a man. His old age is just a ripening for something better a little further on. All that we go through with here isn't for nothing, and at eighty-five, when it looks as if a man had come to the stepping-off place, I've come to believe that 'the best is yet to be.'"

There is a stir around the door, and the old miller looks around inquiringly. The mail has come in, and he rises slowly to get his weekly paper. Perkins's oldest, waiting his turn in front of the little case of pigeonholes, eyes the old man with wondering side glances. He has not understood more than half of what he has heard, but he is vaguely conscious that something is speaking to him now, as he looks into the tranquil old face. It is the miller's past that is calling to him; all those honest, hard-working years that show themselves in the bent form and wrinkled hands; the serene peacefulness that bespeaks a clear conscience; the big, sunny nature that looks out of those aged eyes; and above all the great hopefulness that makes his days a perpetual Thanksgiving.

The mute eloquence of an unspoken invitation thrills the child's heart, he knows not why:

"Grow old along with me;
The best is yet to be!"

It is the greatest lesson that Perkins's oldest can ever learn.

Chapter II

ONE would have known that it was the day before Christmas at the Cross-Roads store, even if the big life insurance calendar over the desk had not proclaimed the fact in bold red figures. An unwonted bustle pervaded the place. Rows of plump, dressed turkeys hung outside the door, and on the end of the counter where the pyramid of canned tomatoes was usually stacked, a little evergreen tree stood in a brave array of tinsel and tiny Christmas tapers.

It was only an advertisement. No one might hope to be the proud possessor of the Noah's ark lodged in its branches, or of the cheap toys and candy rings dangling from every limb, unless he had the necessary pennies. Still, every child who passed it eyed it with such wistful glances that the little rubber Santa Claus at the base must have felt his elastic heart stretch almost to bursting.

Above the familiar odour of coal-oil and mackerel, new leather, roasted coffee and pickle brine, rose the holiday fragrance of cedar and oranges.

"Makes me think of when I was a kid," said a drummer who had been joking with the men around the stove, trying to kill time while he waited for the train that was to take him home for Christmas. "There's nothing like that smell of cedar and oranges to resurrect the boy in a man. It puts me straight back into knickerbockers again, among a whole grove of early Christmas trees. I'll never forget the way I felt when I picked my first pair of skates off one of them. A house and lot wouldn't give me such a thrill now."

"Aw, I don't believe Christmas is at all what it's cracked up to be," said a voice from behind the stove, in such a gloomy tone that a knowing smile passed around the circle.

"Bet on you, Bud Hines, for findin' trouble, every time," laughed the storekeeper. "Why, Bud, there ain't no screw loose in Christmas, is there?"

"Well, there just is!" snapped the man, resenting the laugh. "It comes too often for one thing. I just wish it had happened on leap-year, the twenty-ninth of February. It would be a heap less expensive having it just once in four years. Seems to me we're always treading on its heels. My old woman hardly gets done knitting tidies for one Christmas till she's hard at it for another.

"Anyhow, Christmas never measures up to what you think it's a-going to—not by a jug-full. Sure as you get your heart set on a patent nail-puller or a pair of fur gloves—something that'll do you some good—your wife gives you a carpet sweeper, or an alarm-clock that rattles you out an hour too early every morning."

The drummer led the uproarious laughter that followed. They were ready to laugh at anything in this season of good cheer, and the drummer's vociferous merriment was irresistible. He slapped the speaker on the back, adding jokingly, "That's one thing Job never had to put up, did he, partner! He nearly lost his reputation for politeness over the misfit advice he didn't want. But there's no telling what he'd have done with misfit Christmas gifts. It would take a star actor to play the grateful for some of the things people find in their stockings. For instance, to have a fond female relative give you a shaving outfit, when you wear a full beard."

"You bet your life," answered the storekeeper feelingly. "Now, if Santa Claus wasn't a fake—"

"Hist!" said the drummer, with a significant glance toward a small boy, perched on a soap-box in their midst, listening open-mouthed to every word. "I've children myself, and I'd punch anybody's head who would shake their faith in Santy. It's one of the rosy backgrounds of childhood, in my opinion, and I've got a heap of happiness out of it since I was a kid, too, looking back and recollecting."

It was very little happiness that the boy on the soap-box was getting out of anything, that gray December afternoon. He was weighed down with a feeling of age and responsibility that bore heavily on his eight-year-old shoulders. He had long felt the strain of his position, as pattern to the house of Perkins, being the oldest of five. Now there was another one, and to be counted as the oldest of six pushed him almost to the verge of gray hairs.

There was another reason for his tear-stained face. He had been disillusioned. Only that noon, his own mother had done that for which the drummer would have punched any one's head, had it been done to his children. "We're too poor, Sammy. There can't be any Christmas at our house this year," she had said, fretfully, as she stopped the noisy driving of nails into the chimney, on which he contemplated hanging the fraternal stockings. To his astonished "Why?" she had replied with a few blunt truths that sent him out from her presence, shorn of all his childish hopefulness as completely as Samson was shorn of his strength.

There had been a sorry half-hour in the hay-mow, where he snuffled over his shattered faith alone, and from whence he went out, a hardened little skeptic, to readjust himself to a cold and Santa Clausless world. The only glimmer of comfort he had had since was when the drummer, with a friendly wink, slipped a nickel into his hand. But even that added to his weight of responsibility. He dropped it back and forth from one little red mitten to another, with two impulses strong upon him. The first was to spend it for six striped sticks of peppermint candy, one for each stocking, and thus compel Christmas to come to the house of Perkins. The other was to buy one orange and go off in a corner and suck it all by himself. He felt that fate owed him that much of a reparation for his disappointment. He was in the midst of this inward debate when a new voice joined the discussion around the stove. It came from Cy Akers.

"Well, I think it's downright sinful to stuff a child with such notions. You may call 'em fairy-tales all you like, but it's nothing more or less than a pack of lies. The idea of a Christian payrent sitting up and telling his immortal child that a big fat man in furs will drive through the air to-night in a reindeer sleigh right over the roofs and squeeze himself down a lot of sooty chimneys, with a bag of gimcracks on his back—it's all fol-de-rol! I never could see how any intelligent young one could believe it. I never did. But that's one thing about me, as the poet says, 'If I've one pecooliar feature it's a nose that won't be led.' I never could be made to take stock in any such nonsense, even as a boy. I'll leave it to Mr. Asa Holmes, here, if it isn't wrong to be putting such ideas into the youth of our land."

The old miller ran his fingers through his short white hair and looked around. His smile was wholesome as it was genial. He was used to being called in judgment on these neighbourhood discussions, and he spoke with the air of one who felt that his words carried weight:

"You're putting it pretty strong, Cy," he said, with a laugh, and then a tender, reminiscent light gleamed in his old eyes.

"You see it's this way with me, boys. We never heard any of these things when I was a lad. It's plain facts in a pioneer cabin, you know. Father taught us about Christmas in the plain words that he found set down in the Gospels, and I told it the same way to my boys. When my first little grandson came back to the old house to spend Christmas, I thought it was almost heathenish for his mother to have him send letters up the chimney and talk as if Santa Claus was some real person. I told her so one day, and asked what was going to happen when the little fellow outgrew such beliefs.

"'Why, Father Holmes,' said she,—I can hear her now, words and tones, for it set me to thinking,—'don't you see that he is all the time growing into a broader belief? It's this way.' She picked up a big apple from the table. 'Once this apple was only a tiny seed-pod in the heart of a pink blossom. The beauty of the blossom was all that the world saw, at first, but gradually, as the fruit swelled and developed, the pink petals fell off, naturally and easily, and the growing fruit was left. My little son's idea of Christmas is in the blossom time now. This rosy glamour of old customs and traditions that makes it so beautiful to him is taking the part of the pink petals. They will fall away by and by, of their own accord, for underneath a beautiful truth is beginning to swell to fruitage. Santa Claus is the Spirit of Christmas love and giving, personified. It is because I want to make it real and vital, something that my baby's mind can grasp and enjoy, that I incarnate it in the form of the good old Saint Nicholas, but I never let him lose sight of the Star. It was the Spirit of Christmas that started the wise men on their search, and they followed the Star and they found the Child, and laid gifts at his feet. And when the Child was grown, he, too, went out in the world and followed the Star and scattered his gifts of love and healing for all the children of men. And so it has gone on ever since, that Spirit of Christmas, impelling us to follow and to find and to give, wherever there is a need for our gold and frankincense and myrrh. That is the larger belief my boy is growing into, from the smaller.'

"And she is right," said the old man, after an impressive pause. "She raised that boy to be an own brother to Santa Claus, as far as good-will to men goes. It's Christmas all the year round wherever he is. And now when he brings his boys back to the old home and hangs their stockings up by the fire, I never say a word. Sometimes when the little chaps are hunting for the marks of the reindeer hoofs in the ashes, I kneel down on the old hearthstone and hunt, too.

"A brother to Santa Claus!" The phrase still echoed in the heart of Perkins's oldest when the group around the stove dispersed. It was that which decided the fate of the nickel, and filled the little red mittens with sticks of striped delight for six, instead of the lone orange for one. Out of a conversation but dimly understood he had gathered a vague comfort. It made less difference that his patron saint was a myth, since he had learned there might be brothers in the Claus family for him to fall back upon. Then his fingers closed over the paper bag of peppermints, and, suddenly, with a little thrill, he felt that in some queer way he belonged to that same brotherhood.

As he fumbled at the latch, the old miller, who always saw his own boyhood rise before him in that small tow-headed figure, and who somehow had divined the cause of the tear-streaks on the dirty little face, called him. "Here, sonny!" It was a pair of shining new skates that dangled from the miller's hands into his.

One look of rapturous delight, and two little feet were flying homeward down the frozen pike, beating time to a joy that only the overflowing heart of a child can know, when its troubles are all healed, and faith in mankind restored. And the old man, going home in the frosty twilight of the Christmas eve, saw before him all the way the light of a shining star.

Chapter III

IT was an hour past the usual time for closing the Cross-Roads store, but no one made a move to go. Listening in the comfortable glow of the red-hot stove, to the wind whistling down the long pipe, was far pleasanter than facing its icy blasts on the way home. Besides, it was the last night of the old year, and hints of forthcoming cider had been dropped by Jim Bowser, the storekeeper. Also an odour of frying doughnuts came in from the kitchen, whenever Mrs. Bowser opened the door into the entry.

Added to the usual group of loungers was the drummer who had spent Christmas eve with them. He had come in on an accommodation train, and was waiting for the midnight express. He had had the floor for some time with his stories, when suddenly in the midst of the laughter which followed one of his jokes, Bud Hines made himself heard.

"I say, Jim," he exclaimed, turning to the storekeeper, "why don't you tear off the last leaf of that calendar? We've come to the end of everything now; end of the day, end of the year, end of the century! Something none of us will ever experience again. It's always a mighty solemn thought to me that I'm doing a thing for the la-ast time!"

Jim laughed cheerfully, tilting his chair back against the counter, and thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his vest.

"I don't know as I feel any call to mourn over takin' down an old calendar when I have a prettier one to put in its place, and it's the same way with the century. There'll be a better one to begin on in the morning."

"That's so," asserted Cy Akers. "But some people come bang up against a New Year as if it was a stone wall, and down they set and count up their sins, and turn over new leaves, and load 'emselves down with so many good resolutions that they stick in the mud by the end of the first week. Now I hold that if it wasn't for the almanacs, steppin' from one year to another, or from one century to another, wouldn't jar you no more than steppin' over the equator. They're only imaginary lines, and nobody would ever know where he was at, either in months or meridians, if he didn't have almanacs and the like to keep him posted. Fourth of July is just as good a time to take stock and turn over a new leaf as the first of January."

"Maybe you take stock like a man I used to sell to down in Henderson County," said the drummer. "He never kept any books, so he never knew exactly where he was 'at,' as you say. Once a year he'd walk around the store with his hands in his pockets, and size up things in a general sort of way. 'Bill,' he'd say to his clerk, cocking his eyes up at the shelves, 'we've got a right smart chance of canned goods left over. I reckon there's a half shelf full more than we had left last year. I know there's more bottles of ketchup.' Then he'd take another turn around the room. 'Bill, I disremember how many pitchforks we had in this rack. There's only two left now. Nearly all the calico is sold, and (thumping the molasses barrel), this here bar'l sounds like it's purty nigh empty. Take it all around, Bill, we've done first-rate this year, so I don't know as it's worth while botherin' about weighin' and measurin' what's left over, so long as we're satisfied.' And maybe that's why Cy makes so little of New Year," added the drummer, with a sly wink at the others. "He thinks it's not worth while to weigh and measure his shortcomings when he can take stock of himself in a general sort of a way, and always be perfectly satisfied with himself."

There was a laugh at Cy's expense, and Bud Hines began again.

"What worries me is, what's been prophesied about the new century. One would think we've had enough famines and plagues and wars and rumours of wars in this here old one to do for awhile, but from what folks say, it ain't goin' to hold a candle to the trouble we'll see in the next one."

"Troubles is seasonin'. ''Simmons ain't good till they are frostbit,'" quoted Cy.

"Then accordin' to Bud's tell, he ought to be the best seasoned persimmon on the bough," chuckled the storekeeper.

"No, that fellow that was here this afternoon goes ahead of Bud," insisted Cy, turning to the drummer. "I wish you could have heard him, pardner. He came in to get a postal order for some money he wanted to send in a letter, and he nearly wiped up the earth with poor old Bowser, because there was a two-cent war tax to pay on it.

"'Whose war?' says he. ''Tain't none of my makin',' says he, 'and I'll be switched if I'll pay taxes on a thing I've been dead set against from the start. It's highway robbery,' says he, 'to load the country down with a war debt in times like these. It's kill yourself to keep yourself these days, and as my Uncle Josh used to say after the Mexican war, "it's tough luck when people are savin' and scrimpin' at the spigot for the government to be drawin' off at the bung."'

"Bowser here just looked him over as if he'd been a freak at a side-show, and said Bowser, in a dry sort of way, he guessed, 'when it came to the pinch, the spigot wouldn't feel that a two-cent stamp was a killin' big leakage.'

"The fellow at that threw the coppers down on the counter, mad as a hornet. 'It's the principle of the thing,' says he. 'Uncle Sam had no business to bite off more'n he could chew and then call on me to help. What's the war done for this country, anyhow?'

"He was swinging his arms like a stump speaker at a barbecue, by this time. 'What's it done?' says he. 'Why it's sent the soldiers back from Cuba with an itch as bad as the smallpox, and as ketchin' to them citizens that wanted peace, as to them that clamoured for war. I know what I'm talkin' about, for my hired man like to 'uv died with it, and he hadn't favoured the war any more than a spring lamb. And what's it doin' for us, now?' says he. 'Sendin' the poor fellows back from the Philippines by the ship-load, crazy as June-bugs. I know what I'm talkin' about. That happened to one of my wife's cousins. What was it ever begun for,' says he, 'tell me that!'

"Peck here, behind the stove, sung out like a fog-horn, 'Remember the Maine!' Peck knew what a blow the fellow had made at an indignation meeting when the news first came. No tellin' what would have happened then if a little darky hadn't put his head in at the door and yelled, 'Say, mistah, yo' mules is done backed yo' wagon in de ditch!' He tore out to tend to them, or we might have had another Spanish war right here among Bowser's goods and chattels."

"No danger," said Peck, dryly, "he isn't the kind of a fellow to fight for principle. It's only when his pocketbook is touched he wants to lick somebody. He's the stingiest man I ever knew, and I've known some mighty mean men in my time."

"What's the matter with you all to-night?" said the drummer. "You're the most pessimistic crowd I've struck in an age. This is the tune you've been giving me from the minute I lifted the latch." And beating time with foot and hands in old plantation style, the drummer began forthwith to sing in a deep bass voice that wakened the little Bowsers above:

"Ole Satan is loose an' a-bummin'!
De wheels er distruckshin is a-hummin.'
Oh, come 'long, sinner, ef you comin'!"

The door into the entry opened a crack and Mrs. Bowser's forefinger beckoned.

"Here's good-bye to the old and good luck to the new," cried Jim, jumping up to take the big pitcher of cider that she passed through the opening.

"And here's to Mrs. Bowser," cried the drummer, taking the new tin cup filled for him with the sparkling cider, and helping himself to a hot doughnut from the huge panful which she brought in. "It's a pretty good sort of world, after all, that gives you cakes as crisp and sugary as these. 'Speak well of the bridge that carries you over' is my motto, so don't let another fellow cheep to-night, unless he can say something good of the poor old century or the men who've lived in it!"

"Mr. Holmes! Mr. Asa Holmes!" cried several voices.

The old miller, who had been silent all evening, straightened himself up in his chair and drew his hand over his eyes.

"I feel as if I were parting with an old comrade, to-night," he said. "The century had only fifteen years the start of me, and it's a long way we've travelled together. I've been sitting here, thinking how much we've lived through. Listen, boys."

It was a brief series of pictures he drew for them, against the background of his early pioneer days. They saw him, a little lad, trudging more than a mile on a winter morning to borrow a kettle of hot coals, because the fire had gone out on his own hearthstone, and it was before the days of matches. They saw him huddled with the other little ones around his mother's knee when the wolves howled in the night outside the door, and only the light of a tallow-dip flickered through the darkness of the little cabin. They saw the struggle of a strong life against the limitations of the wilderness, and realised what the battle must have been oftentimes, against sudden disease and accident and death, with the nearest doctor a three days' journey distant, and no smoke from any neighbour's chimney rising anywhere on all the wide horizon.

While he talked, a heavy freight train rumbled by outside; the wind whistled through the telegraph wires. The jingle of a telephone bell interrupted his reminiscences. The old man looked up with a smile. "See what we have come to," he said, "from such a past to a time when I can say 'hello,' across a continent. Cables and cross-ties and telegraph poles have annihilated distance. The century and I came in on an ox-cart; we are going out on a streak of lightning.

"But that's not the greatest thing," he said, pausing, while the listening faces grew still more thoughtful. "Think of the hospitals! The homes! The universities! The social settlements! The free libraries! The humane efforts everywhere to give humanity an uplift! When I think of all this century has accomplished, of the heroic lives it has produced, I haven't a word to say about its mistakes and failures. After all, how do we know that the things we cry out against are mistakes?

"This war may be a Samson's riddle that we are not wise enough to read. Those who shall come after us may be able to say 'Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness!'"

Somewhere in an upper room a clock struck twelve, and deep silence fell on the little company as they waited for the solemn passing of the century. It was no going out as of some decrepit Lear tottering from his throne. Perhaps no man there could have put it in words, but each one felt that its majestic leave-taking was like the hoary old apostle's: "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

Chapter IV

FOR some occult reason, the successful merchant in small towns and villages is the confidant, if not father-confessor, of a large number of his patronesses. It may be that his flattering air of personal interest, assumed for purely business purposes, loosens not only the purse-strings but the spring that works the panorama of private affairs. Or it may be an idiosyncrasy of some classes of the mind feminine, to make no distinction between a bargain counter and a confessional. Whatever the cause, many an honest merchant can testify that it is no uncommon thing for a woman to air her domestic troubles while she buys a skirt braid, or to drag out her family skeleton with the sample of sewing silk she wishes to match.

The Cross-Roads had had its share of confidences, although as a rule the women who disposed of their butter and eggs in trade to Bowser were of the patient sort, grown silent under the repressing influence of secluded farm life. Still, Bowser, quick to see and keen to judge, had gained a remarkable insight into neighbourhood affairs in fifteen years' dealings with his public. "All things come to him who waits" if he wears an air of habitual interest and has a sympathetic way of saying "Ah! indeed!"

It was with almost the certainty of foreknowledge that Bowser counted his probable patrons as he spread out his valentines on the morning of the fourteenth of February. He had selected his comic ones with a view to the feud that existed between the Hillock and Bond families, well knowing that a heavy cross-fire of ugly caricatures and insulting rhymes would be kept up all day by the younger members of those warring households. It was with professional satisfaction he smiled over the picture of a fat man with a donkey's head, which he was as sure would be sent by Pete Hillock to old man Bond, as if he had heard Pete's penny dropping into the cash-drawer.

"Nothing like supplying the demand," he chuckled.

It was with more than professional interest that he arranged the lace-paper valentines in the show-case, for the little embossed Cupids had a strong ally in this rustic haberdasher, whose match-making propensities had helped many a little romance to a happy issue. Drawing on his fund of private information, acquired in his rôle of confidant to the neighbourhood gossips, he set out his stock of plump red hearts, forget-me-nots, and doves; and with each addition to the festal array he nodded his head knowingly over the particular courtship it was designed to speed, or the lovers' quarrel that he hoped might be ended thereby.

There had been two weeks of "February thaw." Melting snow had made the mud hub-deep in places. There was a velvety balminess in the touch of the warm wind, and faint, elusive odours, prophetic of spring, rose from the moist earth and sap-quickened trees.

The door of the Cross-Road store stood open, and behind it, at the post-office desk, sat Marion Holmes, the old miller's granddaughter. Just out of college and just into society, she had come to spend Lent in the old place that had welcomed her every summer during her childhood. The group around the stove stared covertly at the pretty girl in the tailor-made gown, failing to recognise in the tall, stylish figure any trace of the miller's "little Polly," who used to dangle her feet from the counter and munch peppermint drops, while she lisped nursery rhymes for their edification.

She had come for the letters herself, she told Bowser, because she was expecting a whole bag full, and her grandfather's rheumatism kept him at home. Installed in the post-office chair, behind the railing that enclosed the sanctum of pigeon-holes, she amused herself by watching the customers while she waited for the mail-train.

"It's like looking into a kaleidoscope," she told Bowser in one of the pauses of trade. "Every one who comes in gives me a different point of view and combination of opinions. Now, those valentines! I was thinking what old-fashioned things those little lace-paper affairs are, and wondering how anybody could possibly get up any thrills over them, when in walked Miss Anastasia Dill. Prim and gentle as ever, isn't she? Still getting her styles from Godey's Lady's Books of the early sixties; she must draw on their antiquated love stories for her sentiment, too, for she seemed lost in admiration of those hearts and darts. What do you suppose is Miss Anastasia's idea of a lover?"

Marion rattled on with all of a débutante's reckless enthusiasm for any subject under discussion. "Wouldn't he be as odd and old-fashioned as the lace valentines themselves? She'd call him a suitor, wouldn't she? I wonder if she ever had one."

Then Bowser, piecing together the fragmentary gossip of fifteen years, told Marion all he knew of Miss Anastasia's gentle romance; and Marion, idly clasping and unclasping the little Yale pin on her jacket, gained another peep into the kaleidoscope of human experiences.

"I have read of such devotion to a memory," she said when the story was done, "but I never met it in the flesh. What a pity he died while he was on such a high pedestal in her imagination. If he had lived she would have discovered that there are no such paragons, and all the other sons of Adam needn't have suffered by comparison. So she's an old maid simply because she put her ideal of a lover so high in the clouds nobody could live up to it! Dear old Miss Anastasia!"

Bowser pulled his beard. "Such couples make me think of these here lamps with double wicks," he said. "They hardly ever burn along together evenly. One wick is sure to flare up higher than the other; you either have to keep turning it down and get along with a half light or let it smoke the chimney—maybe crack it—and make things generally uncomfortable. But here comes somebody, Miss Marion, who's burned along pretty steady, and that through three administrations. It's her brag that she's had three husbands and treated them just alike, even to the matter of tombstones. 'Not a pound difference in the weight nor a dollar in the price,' she always says."

The newcomer was a fat, wheezy woman, spattered with mud from the hem of her skirt to the crown of her big crape bonnet, which had tipped on one side with the jolting of the wagon.

"Well, Jim Bowser!" she exclaimed, catching sight of the valentines. "Ef you ain't got out them silly, sentimental fol-de-rols again! My nephew, Jason Potter,—that's my second husband's sister's son, you know,—spent seventy-five cents last year to buy one of them silly things to send to his girl; and I says to him, 'Jason,' says I, 'ef I'd been Lib Meadows, that would 'uv cooked your goose with me! Any man simple enough to waste his substance so, wouldn't make a good provider.' I ought to know—I've been a wife three times."

This, like all other of Mrs. Power's conversational roads, led back to the three tombstones, and started a flow of good-natured badinage on the subject of matrimony, which continued long after she had taken her noisy departure. "Well!" exclaimed Bud Hines, as the big crape bonnet went jolting down the road, "I guess there's three good men gone that could tell why heaven is heaven."

"Why?" asked Cy Akers.

"Because there's no marryin' or givin' in marriage there."

"Bud speaks feelingly!" said Cy, winking at the others. "He'd better get a job on a newspaper to write Side Talks with Henpecked Husbands."

"Shouldn't think you'd want to hear any extrys or supplements," retorted Bud. "You get enough in your own daily editions."

"St. Valentine has been generous with my little Polly," said the old miller, looking up fondly at the tall, graceful girl, coming into his room, her face aglow and her arms full of packages.

"But what's the good of it all, grandfather?" answered Marion. "I've been looking into Cupid's kaleidoscope through other people's eyes this afternoon, and nothing is rose-coloured as I thought. Everything is horrid. 'Marriage is a failure,' and sentiment is a silly thing that people make flippant jokes about, or else break their hearts with, like Mr. Bowser's double-wick lamps, that flare up and crack their chimneys. I've come to the conclusion that St. Valentine has outlived his generation."

She broke the string which bound one of the boxes that she had dropped on the table, and took out a great dewy bunch of sweet violets. As their fragrance filled the room, the old man looked around as if half expecting to see some familiar presence; then dropped his white head with a sigh, and gazed into the embers on the hearth, lost in a tender reverie.

Presently he said, "I wish you would hand me that box on my wardrobe shelf, little girl." As Marion opened the wardrobe door, something hanging there made her give a little start of surprise. It was an old familiar gray dress, with the creases still in the bent sleeves just as they had been left when the tired arms last slipped out of them. That was ten years ago; and Marion, standing there with a mist gathering in her eyes, recalled the day her grandfather had refused to let any one fold it away. It had hung there all those years, the tangible reminder of the strong, sweet presence that had left its imprint on every part of the household.

"It is like my life since she slipped out of it," the old man had whispered, smoothing the empty sleeve with his stiff old fingers. "Like my heart—set to her ways at every turn, and left just as she rounded it out—but now—so empty!"

He lifted an old dog-eared school-book from the box that Marion brought him, a queer little "Geography and Atlas of the Heavens," in use over fifty years ago. Inside was a tiny slip of paper, time-yellowed and worn. The ink was faded, until the words written in an unformed girlish hand were barely legible:

"True as grapes grow on a vine,
I will be your Valentine."

"I had put a letter into her Murray's grammar," he explained, holding up another little book. "Here is the page, just at the conjugation of the verb 'to love.' You see I was a big, shy, overgrown boy that lost my tongue whenever I looked at her, although she wasn't fifteen then, and only reached my shoulder. This valentine was the answer that she slipped into my atlas of the heavens. I thought the sky itself had never held such a star. We walked home across the woodland together that day, never saying a word. It was the last of the February thaw, and the birds were twittering as if it were really spring. Just such a day as this. All of a sudden, right at my feet, I saw something smiling up at me, blue as the blue of my Polly's eyes. I stooped and brushed away the leaves, and there were two little violets.

"As I gave them to her I wanted to say, 'There will always be violets in my heart for you, my Polly,' but I couldn't speak a word. I know she understood, for long years after—when she was dead—I found them here. She had pinned them on the page where my letter had lain, here on the conjugation that says, 'we love,' and she had added the word 'for ever.'"

A tear dropped on the dead violets as the old man reverently closed the book, and sat gazing again into the dying embers. There was a tremulous smile on his face. Was it backward over the hills of their youth he was wandering, or ahead to those heights of Hope, where love shall "put on immortality?"

Marion laid her warm cheek against her violets, still fragrant with the sweetness of their fresh, unfaded youth. Then taking a cluster from the great dewy bunch, she fastened it at her throat with the little Yale pin.

Chapter V

TRADE was dull at the Cross-Roads. Jim Bowser, his hands thrust into his pockets and his lips puckered to a whistle, stood looking through the dingy glass of his front door. March was coming in with a snow-storm, and all he could see in any direction was a blinding fall of white flakes. There were only three men behind the stove that afternoon, and one of them was absorbed in a newspaper. Conversation flagged, and from time to time Bud Hines yawned audibly.

"This is getting to be mighty monotonous," remarked the storekeeper, glancing from the falling snow to the silent group by the stove.

"March always is," answered Bud Hines. "The other months have some holiday in 'em; something to brighten 'em up, if it's no more than a family birthday. But to me, March is as dull and uninteresting as a mud road."

"There's the inauguration this year," suggested Cy Akers, looking up from his newspaper. "That's a big event. This paper is full of it."

"Well, now you've hit it!" exclaimed Bud, with withering scorn, as he bit off another chew of tobacco. "That is exciting! Just about as interesting as watching a man take his second helping of pie. I wouldn't go across the road to see it. Now in a monarchy, where death makes the changes, it can't get to be a cut and dried affair that takes place every four years. They make a grand occasion of it, too, with their pomp and ceremony. Look at what England's just seen. It's the sight of a lifetime to bury a queen and crown a king. But what do we see when we change Presidents? One man sliding into a chair and another sliding out, same as when the barber calls 'Next!' Humph!"

Cy Akers rubbed his chin. "Fuss and feathers! That's all it amounts to," he exclaimed. "I'm down on monopolies, and in my opinion it's the worst kind of monopoly to let one family crowd out everybody else in the king business. I like a country where every man in it has a show. Not that I'd be President, if they offered me double the salary, but it is worth a whole lot to me to feel that in case I did want the office, I've as good a right to it as any man living. And talk about sights—I say it's the sight of a lifetime to see a man step out from his place among the people, anywhere he happens to be when they call his name, take his turn at ruling as if he'd been born to it, and then step back as if nothing had happened."

Bud smiled derisively. "You only see that on paper, my boy. Men don't step quietly into offices in this country. They run for 'em till they are red in the face, and it's the best runner that gets there, not the best man. Monopoly in the king business keeps out the rabble, any how, and it gives a country a good deal more dignity to be ruled by a dynasty than by Tom, Dick, and Harry."

"Well, there's no strings tied to you," said Cy, testily, taking up his newspaper again. "When people don't like the way things are run on this side of the water, there's nothing to hinder emigration."

There was a stamping of snowy feet outside the door, and a big, burly fellow blustered in, whom they hailed as Henry Bicking. He was not popular at the Cross-Roads, having the unenviable reputation of being a "born tease," but any diversion was welcome on such a dull day.

In the catalogue of queer characters which every neighbourhood possesses, the Autocrat, Bore, and Crank may take precedence of all others alphabetically, but the one that heads the list in disagreeableness is that infliction on society known as the "born tease." One can forgive the teasing propensity universally found in boys, as he would condone the playful destructiveness of puppyhood; something requiring only temporary forbearance. But when that trait refuses to be put away with childish things it makes of the man it dominates a sort of human mosquito. He regards every one in reach his lawful prey, from babies to octogenarians, and while he does not always sting, the persistency of his annoying attacks becomes exasperating beyond endurance.

The same motive that made Henry Bicking pull cats' whiskers out by the roots when he was a boy, led him to keep his children in a turmoil, and his sensitive little wife in tears half the time. He had scarcely seated himself by the stove when he was afforded opportunity for his usual pastime by the entrance of half a dozen children, who came tumbling in on their way home from school to warm.

He began with a series of those inane questions by which grown people have made themselves largely responsible for the pertness of the younger generation. If children of this day have departed from that delectable state wherein they were seen and not heard, the fault is due far more to their elders than to them. Often they have been made self-conscious, and forced into saucy self-assertion by the teasing questions that are asked merely to provoke amusing replies.

Henry Bicking's quizzing had an element of cruelty in it. His was the kind that pinches his victims' ears, that tickles to the verge of agony, that threatens all sorts of disagreeable things, for the sake of seeing little faces blanch with fright, or eyes fill with tears of pain.

"Come here, Woodpecker," he began, reaching for a child whose red hair was the grief of his existence. But the boy deftly eluded him, and the little fellow standing next in line, drying his snowball-soaked mittens, became the victim. He was dragged unwillingly to his tormentor's knee.

"What are you going to be when you're a man?" was demanded, when the first questions had elicited the fact that the child's name was Sammy Perkins, and that he was eight years old. But Perkins's oldest, having no knowledge of the grammar of life beyond its present tense indicative, hung his head and held his tongue at mention of its future potential.

"If you don't tell me you sha'n't have your mittens!" Bicking dangled them tantalisingly out of reach, until, after an agonising and unsuccessful scramble, the child was forced into a tearful reply.

Then he began again: "Which are you for, Democrats or Republicans?"

"Ain't for neither."

"Well, you're the littlest mugwump I ever did see. Mugwumps ain't got any right to wear mittens. I've a notion to pitch 'em in the stove."

"Oh, don't!" begged the child. "Please, mister! I'm not a mugwump!"

The tragic earnestness of the child as he disclaimed all right to the term of reproach which he could not understand, yet repudiated because of its obnoxious sound, amused the man hugely. He threw back his head and laughed.

"Tell me who you holler for!" he continued, catching him up and holding him head downward a moment. Then goaded by more teasing questions and a threatening swing of his red mittens toward the stove door, Perkins's oldest was at last led to take a bold stand on his party platform, and publicly declare his political preference. But it was in a shaking voice and between frightened sobs.

"M-ma, she's for McKinley, an' p-pap, he's for B-Bryan, so I jus' holler for Uncle Sam!"

"Good enough for you, sonny," laughed the storekeeper. "That's true blue Americanism. Stick to Uncle Sam and never mind the parties. They've had new blades put on their old handles, and new handles put on those old blades again, till none of 'em are what we started out with. We keep on calling them 'genuine Barlows,' but it's precious little of the original Barlows we're hanging on to nowadays."

It was a woman's voice that interrupted the conversation. Mrs. Teddy Mahone had come in for some tea.

"Arrah, Misther Bicking! Give the bye his mitts! You're worrse than a cat with a mouse."

The loud voice with its rich Irish brogue drew Cy Akers's attention from his newspaper. "By the way, Bud," he exclaimed, raising his voice so that Mrs. Mahone could not fail to hear, "you were complaining about March being so dull and commonplace without any holidays. You've forgotten St. Patrick's Day."

"No, I haven't. St. Patrick is nothing to me. There's no reason I should take any interest in him."

"And did you hear that, Mrs. Mahone," asked Henry Bicking, anxious to start a war of words.

"Oh, Oi heard it, indade Oi did!" she answered with a solemn shake of the head. "It grieves the hearrt of me to hear such ingratichude. There's niver a sowl in all Ameriky but has cause to be grateful for what he's done for this counthry."

"What's he ever done?" asked Bud, skeptically. There was a twinkle in Mrs. Mahone's eyes as she answered:

"It was this way. A gude while back whin it was at the beginnin' iv things, Ameriky said to herself wan day, 'It's a graand pudding Oi'll be afther makin' meself, by a new resait Oi've just thought iv.' So she dips into this counthry for wan set iv immygrants, an' into another counthry for another batch, and after a bit a foine mess she had iv 'em. Dutch an' Frinch an' Eyetalian, Rooshian, Spaniards an' haythen Chinee, all stirred up in wan an' the same pudding-bag.

"'Somethin's lackin',' siz she, afther awhile, makin' a wry face.

"'It's the spice,' siz St. Pathrick, 'ye lift out iv it, an' the leaven. Ye'll have to make parsinal application to meself for it, for Oi'm the only wan knowin' the saicret of where it's to be found.'

"'Then give me some,' siz she, an' St. Pathrick, not loikin' to lave a leddy in trouble, reached out from the auld sod and handed her a fair shprinklin' of them as would act as both spice an' leaven.

"'They'll saison the whole lot,' siz he, 'an' there's light-heartedness enough among them to raise the entoire heavy mass in your whole united pudding-bag.'

"'Thanks,' siz she, stirrin' us in. 'It's the makin' of the dish, sorr, and Oi'm etarnally obliged to ye, sorr. Oi'll be afther puttin' the name of St. Pathrick in me own family calendar, and ivery year on that day, it's the pick iv the land that'll take pride in addin' to me own shtars an' shtripes the wearin' o' the green.'

"Ye see, Misther Hines, ye may think ye're under no parsinal obligation to him, but down-hearted as ye are by nature, what wud ye have been had ye niver coom in conthact with the leaven of St. Pathrick at all, sorr? Oi ask ye that."

Late that night Bowser pushed his ledger aside with a yawn, and got down from his high stool to close the store. As he counted the meagre contents of the cash drawer, he reviewed the day, whose minutes had been as monotonous in passing as the falling of the snowflakes outside. It had left nothing behind it to distinguish it from a hundred other days. The same old faces! The same kind of jokes! The same round of commonplace duties! A spirit of unrest seized him, that made him chafe against such dreary monotony.

When he went to the door to put up the shutters, the beauty of the night held him a moment, and he stood looking across the wide fields, lying white in moonlight and snow. Far down the road a lamp gleamed from the window of an upper room in the old miller's house, where anxious vigil had been kept beside him for hours. The crisis was passed now. Only a little while before, the doctor had stopped by to say that their old friend would live. Down the track a gleaming switch-light marked the place where a wreck had been narrowly averted that morning.

"And no telling how many other misfortunes we've escaped to-day," mused Bowser. "Maybe if a light could be swung out for each one, folks would see that the dull gray days when nothing happens are the ones to be most thankful for, after all."

Chapter VI

APRIL sunshine of mid-afternoon poured in through the open door of the Cross-Roads. The usual group of loungers had gathered around the rusty stove. There was no fire in it; the day was too warm for that, but force of habit made them draw their chairs about it in a circle, as if this common centre were the hub, from which radiated the spokes of all neighbourly intercourse.

The little schoolmistress was under discussion. Her short reign in District No. 3 had furnished a topic of conversation as inexhaustible as the weather, for her régime was attended by startling changes. Luckily for her, the young ideas enjoyed being taught to shoot at wide variance from the targets set up by parental practice and tradition, else the tales told out of school might have aroused more adverse criticism than they did.

"You can't take much stock in her new-fangled notions," was the unanimous opinion at the Cross-Roads. She had "put the cart before the horse" when she laid the time-honoured alphabet on the shelf, and gave the primer class a whole word at a mouthful, before it had cut a single orthographic tooth on such primeval syllables as a-b ab.

"Look at my Willie," exclaimed one of the district fathers. "Beating around the bush with talk about a picture cow, and a real cow, and a word cow, and not knowing whether B comes after W or X. At his age I could say the alphabet forwards or backwards as fast as tongue could go without a slip."

"She's done one sensible thing," admitted Cy Akers. "They tell me she's put her foot down on the scholars playing April fool tricks this year."

"I don't see why," said Henry Bicking. "It has been one of the customs in this district since the schoolhouse was built. What's the harm if the children do take one day in the year for a little foolishness? Let them have their fun, I say."

"But they've carried it too far," was the answer. "It's scandalous they should be allowed to abuse people's rights and feelings and property as they have done the last few years. First of April doesn't justify such cutting up any more than the first of August."

"She's got Scripture on her side," said Squire Dobbs. "You know Solomon says, 'As a mad man who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death, so is the man that deceiveth his neighbour and saith, am I not in sport?'"

"She can't stamp out such a deep-rooted custom in one day," protested Bicking.

"You can bet on the little school-ma'am every time," laughed Bowser. "My daughter Milly says they didn't have regular lessons yesterday afternoon. She had them put their books in their desks.

"Said they'd been studying about wise men all their lives, now they'd study about fools awhile; the fools of Proverbs and the fools of history.

"She read some stories, too, about a cruel disappointment and the troubles brought about by some thoughtless jokes on the first of April. Mighty interesting stories, Milly said. You could have heard a pin drop, and some of the girls cried. Then she drew a picture on the blackboard of a court jester, in cap and bells, and asked if they wouldn't like a change this year. Instead of everybody acting the fool and doing silly things they'd all be ashamed of if they'd only stop to think, wouldn't they rather she'd appoint just one scholar to play the fool for all of them, as the old kings used to do.

"They agreed to that, quick enough, thinking what fun they'd have teasing the one chosen to be it. Then she said she'd appoint the first one this morning who showed himself most deserving of the office. Milly says from the way she smiled when she said it, they're all sure she means to choose the first one who plays an April Fool joke. She'd put it so strong to 'em how silly it was, that there ain't a child in school you could hire to run the risk of being appointed fool for the day. So I think she's coming out ahead as usual."

"After all," said Bud Hines, "there's some lessons to be got out of those old tricks we used to play. For instance, the pocketbook tied to a string. Seems to me that everything in life worth having has a string tied to it, and just as I am about to pick it up, Fate snatches it out of my hands."

"Don't you believe it, Buddy," said Bowser, cheerfully; "you take notice those pocketbooks on strings are always empty ones, and they don't belong to us, so we have no business grabbing for them or feeling disappointed because we can't get something for nothing."

But Bud waved aside the interruption mechanically.

"Then there's the gifts with strings tied to 'em," he continued. "My wife has a rich aunt who is always sending her presents, and writing, 'Understand this is for you, Louisy. You're too generous, and I don't want anybody but your own deserving self to wear this.' Now out in the country here, my wife doesn't have occasion to wear handsome clothes like them once a year, while they'd be the very thing for Clara May, off at Normal School. But not a feather or a ribbon can the child touch because her great-aunt bought them expressly for her ma. Goodness knows she'd have a thousand times more pleasure in seeing Clara May enjoy them, than knowing they were lying away in bureau drawers doing nobody any good. When she takes 'em out at house-cleaning times I say, 'Ma,' says I, 'deliver me from gifts with strings tied to 'em. I'd rather have a ten-cent bandanna, all mine, to have and to hold or to give away as pleased me most, than the finest things your Aunt Honigford's money could buy, if I had to account to her every time I turned around in them.'

"When I give anything I give it, and don't expect to come back, spying around ten years afterward to see if it's worn out, or cracked, or faded, or broken. That's my doctrine."

Marion Holmes, driving along the country road in the old miller's antiquated chaise, drew rein in front of a low picket gate, overhung by mammoth snowball bushes. Down the path, between the rows of budding lilacs and japonicas, came an old gentleman in a quaintly cut, long-tailed coat. He was stepping along nimbly, although he leaned hard on his gold-headed cane.

"'A man he was to all the country dear,'" quoted Marion softly to herself as the minister's benign face smiled a greeting through his big square-bowed spectacles. "I know he must have been Goldsmith's friend, and I wish I dared ask him how long he lived in the Deserted Village." But all she called out to him as he stopped with a courtly bow, under the snowball bushes, was a cheery good morning and an invitation to take a seat beside her if he wanted to drive to the Cross-Roads store.

"Thank you, Miss Polly," he answered, "that is my destination. I am on my way there for a text."

"For a what?" exclaimed Marion in surprise, turning the wheel for him to step in beside her.

"For a text for my Easter sermon," he explained as they drove on in the warm April sunshine. "Ah, I see, Miss Polly, you have not discovered the school of philosophers that centres around the Cross-Roads store. Well, it's not to be wondered at; few people do. I spent a winter in Rome, when I was younger, and one of my favourite walks was up on the Pincian Hill. The band plays in the afternoons, you know, and tourists flock to see the queen drive by. There is a charming view from the summit—the dome of St. Peters against the blue Italian sky, the old yellow Tiber crawling along under its bridges from ruin to ruin, and the immortal city itself, climbing up its historic hills. And on the Pincio one meets everybody,—soldiers and courtiers, flower girls and friars, monks in robes of every order, and pilgrims from all parts of the world.

"The first time I was on the hill, as I wandered among the shrubbery and flowers, I noticed a row of moss-grown pedestals set along each side of the drive for quite a distance. Each pedestal bore the weather-beaten bust of some old sage or philosopher or hero.

"They made no more impression on my mind then, than so many fence-posts, but later I found a workman repairing the statuary one day. He had put a new nose on the mutilated face of an old philosopher, and that fresh white nasal appendage, standing out jauntily in the middle of the ancient gray visage, was so ludicrous I could not help smiling whenever I passed it. I began to feel acquainted with the old fellow, as day after day that nose forced my attention. Sometimes, coming upon him suddenly, the only familiar face in a city full of strangers, I felt that he was an old friend to whom I should take off my hat. Then it became so that I rarely passed him without recalling some of his wise sayings that I had read at college. Many a time he and his row of stony-eyed companions were an inspiration to me in that way.

"It was so that I met these men at the Cross-Roads. They scarcely claimed my attention at first. Then one day I heard one of them give utterance to a time-worn truth in such an original way that I stopped to talk to him.

"Trite as it was, he had hewn it himself out of the actual experiences of his own life. It was the result of his own keen observation of human nature. Set as it was in his homely, uncouth dialect, it impressed me with startling force. Then I listened to his companions, and found that they, too, were sometimes worthy of pedestals. Unconsciously to themselves they have often given me suggestions for my sermons. Ah, it's a pity that the backwoods has no Pincio on which to give its philosophers to posterity!"

Half an hour later as they drove homeward, Marion glanced at her companion. "No text this time," she laughed, breaking the reverie into which the old minister had fallen. "Your sages said nothing but 'good morning, sir,' and there wasn't a single suggestion of Easter in the whole store, except the packages of egg dyes, and some impossible little chocolate rabbits. Oh, yes,—those two little boys playing on the doorstep. Tommy Bowser had evidently taken time by the forelock and sampled his father's dyes, for he had a whole hatful of coloured eggs, and was teaching that little Perkins boy how to play 'bust.' He was an apt scholar, for while I watched he won five of Tommy's eggs and never cracked his own. You should have seen them."

"Oh, I saw them," said the minister, with a smile. "It was those same little lads who suggested the text for my Easter sermon."

Marion gave a gasp of astonishment. "Would you mind telling me how?" she exclaimed.

"It came about very naturally. There they stood with their hands full of the Easter eggs, with never a thought of what they symbolised—the breaking shell—the rising of this little embryo earth-existence to the free full-winged life of the Resurrection. They were too intent on their little game, on their small winnings and losings, to have a thought for higher things. As I watched them it occurred to me how typical it was of all the children of men, and instantly that text from Luke flashed into my mind: 'Their eyes were holden.' Do you remember? It was when the two disciples went down to Emmaus. I often picture it," mused the old man after a little pause. "The green of the olive groves, the red and white of the blossoming almond-trees, the late afternoon sunshine, and those two discouraged fishermen trudging along the dusty road. They were turning away from a lost cause and a buried hope, too absorbed in their overwhelming grief to see that it was the risen Lord Himself who walked beside them. Not till the end of their journey did they know why it was that their hearts had burned within them as He talked with them by the way. Their eyes were holden.

"How typical that is, too, Miss Polly. Sometimes we go on to the end of life, missing the comfort and help that we might have had at every step, because we look up at our Lord only through eyes of clay, and hold communion with him as with a stranger. Yes, I shall certainly make that the subject of my Easter sermon, Miss Polly. Thank you for helping me discover it."

That next Sunday as Marion sat in church beside the old miller, her gaze wandered from the lilies in the chancel to the faces of the waiting congregation. Bud Hines was there and Bowser, Cy Akers, and even Perkins's oldest, whose game of "bust" had suggested the helpful sermon of the morning. Marion studied the serious, weather-beaten faces with new interest. "It is not in spiritual things alone that our eyes are holden," she said to herself. "I have been looking at only the commonplace exterior of these people. It takes a man like the old minister to recognise unpedestalled virtues and to set them on the Pincio they deserve."

Chapter VII

THE old saying that "there are always two sides to a story" has worn a deep rut into the popular mind. It has been handed down to us so often with an air of virtuous rebuke, that we have come to regard the individual who insists on his two-sided theory as the acme of all that is broad-minded and tolerant. But in point of fact, if two sides is all he sees, he is only one remove from the bigot whose mental myopia limits him to a single narrow facet.

Even such a thing as a May-day picnic is polyhedral. The little schoolmistress, who was the chief promoter of the one at the Cross-Roads, would have called it a parallelopiped, if she had been there that morning, to have seen the different expressions portrayed on the faces of six people who were interested in it.

The business side of the picnic appealed to Bowser. As he bustled around, dusting off cases of tinned goods that he had long doubted his ability to dispose of, and climbed to the top shelves for last summer's shop-worn cans of sardines and salmon, as he sliced cheese, and counted out the little leathery lemons that time had shrivelled, his smile was as bland as the May morning itself. One could plainly see that he regarded this picnic as a special dispensation of Providence, to help him work off his old stock.

There were no loungers in the store. Field and garden claimed even the idlest, and only the old miller, who had long ago earned his holiday, sat in the sun on the porch outside, with his chair tipped back against the wall. At intervals a warm breath from the apple orchard, in bloom across the road, touched his white hair in passing, and stirred his memory until he sat oblivious of his surroundings. He was wholly unmindful of the gala stir about him, save when Polly recalled his wandering thoughts. She, keenly alive to every sensation of the present, stood beside him with her hand on his shoulder, while she waited for her picnic basket to be filled.

"Isn't it an ideal May-day, grandfather?" she exclaimed. "It gives me a real Englishy feeling of skylarks and cuckoos and cowslips, of primroses and village greens. I think it is dear of the little school-ma'am to resurrect the old May-pole dance, and give the children some idea of 'Merrie old England' other than the dates and dust of its ancient history." Unconsciously beating time with light fingertips on the old man's shoulder, she began to hum half under her breath:

"'And then my heart with rapture thrills,
And dances with the daffodills-o-dills—
And dances with the daffodils!'"

Suddenly she broke off with a girlish giggle of enjoyment. "Listen, grandfather. There's little Cora Bowser up-stairs, rehearsing her speech while she dresses. Isn't it delicious to be behind the scenes!"

Through an open bedroom window, a high-pitched, affected little voice came shrilly down to them: "'If you're wa-king, call me early! Call me early, mother dear!'"

"Now, Cora," interrupted the maternal critic, "you went and forgot to make your bow; and how many times have I told you about turning your toes out? You'll have to begin all over again." Then followed several beginnings, each brought to a stop by other impatient criticisms. There were so many pauses in the rehearsal and reminders to pay attention to manners, commas, and refractory ribbons, that when Cora was finally allowed to proceed, it was in a tearful voice punctuated with sobs, that she declared, "'To-morrow will be the ha-happiest day of all the g-glad new year.'"

"'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,'" quoted the old miller with a smile, as Mrs. Bowser's parting injunction reached their ears.

"Now, Cora, for goodness' sake, don't you forget for one minute this whole enduring day, that them daisies on your crown came off your teacher's best hat, and have to be put back on. If you move around much to the picnic you might lose some of 'em. Best keep pretty quiet anyway, or your sash will come unpinned, and the crimp will all get out of your hair. Wish I'd thought to iron them plaits before I unbraided 'em. They'd have been lots frizzier."

It was a very stiffly starched, precise little Queen o' the May who came down the steep back stairs into the store. She stepped like a careful peacock, fearing to ruffle a feather of her unrivalled splendour. Her straight flaxen hair, usually as limp as a string, stood out in much crimped profusion from under her gilt paper crown. Polly could not decide whether the pucker on the little forehead came from anxiety concerning the borrowed daisies which starred her crown, or the fact that it was too tightly skewered to the royal head by a relentless hat-pin.

One of the picnic wagons was waiting at the door, and as Bowser lifted her in among her envious and admiring schoolmates, Polly saw with sympathetic insight which of its many sides the picnic parallelopiped was presenting to the child in that proud moment. The feeling of supreme importance that it bestowed is a joy not permitted to all, and rarely does it come to any mortal more than once in a lifetime.

But for every Haman, no matter how resplendent, sits an unmoved Mordecai in the king's gate. So to this little Sheba of the Cross-Roads there was one who bowed not down. Perkins's oldest, on the front seat beside the driver, had no eyes for her. He scarcely looked in her direction. His glances were all centred on the baskets which Bowser was packing in around his feet. He smelled pickles and pies and ham sandwiches. He knew of sundry tarts and dressed eggs in his own basket, and wild rumours had reached his ears that Miss Polly intended to stand treat to the extent of Bowser's entire stock of bananas and candy. Aside from hopes of a surreptitious swim in the creek and a wild day in the woods, his ideas of a picnic were purely prandial.

Across the road, Miss Anastasia Dill, peeping through the blinds, watched the wagon rattle off with its merry load. Long after the laughing voices had passed beyond her hearing, she still stood there, one slender hand holding back the curtain, and the other shading her faded blue eyes, as she gazed absently after them. It was the sunshine of another May-day she was looking into. Presently with a little start she realised that she was not out in the cool green woods with a May-basket in her hands, brimming over with anemones. She was all alone in her stuffy little parlour, with its hair-cloth furniture and depressing crayon portraits. And the canary was chirping loudly for water, and the breakfast cups were still unwashed. But for once, heedless of her duties, even unmindful of the fact that she had left the shutters open, and the hot sun was streaming across her cherished store carpet, she drew a chair up to the marble-topped centre table, and deliberately sat down. There was a pile of old-fashioned daguerreotypes in front of her. She opened them one by one, and then took up another that lay by itself on a blue beaded mat. So the face it dimly pictured held a sacred place, apart, in her memory. When her eyes had grown misty with long gazing, she lifted a book from its place beside the family Bible. It was bound in red leather, and it had a quaint wreath of embossed roses around the gilt letters of its title, "The Album of the Heart." It was an autograph album, and as she slowly turned the pages she remembered that every hand that had traced a sentiment or a signature therein had once upon a time gathered anemones with her in some one of those other May-days.

Then she turned through the pages again. Of all that circle of early friends not one was left to give her a hand-clasp. She had friends in plenty, but the old ones—the early ones—the roots of whose growth had twined with hers in the intimacy known only to childhood, were all gone. The May-day picnic brought only a throb of pain to gentle Miss Anastasia, for to her it was but the lonely echo of a "voice that was still."

Bud Hines watched the wagon drive away with far different emotions. He had happened to come into the store for a new hoe, as the gay party started. "It's all foolishness," he grumbled to the miller, "to lose a whole day's schooling while they go gallivanting around the country for nothing. They'll ride ten miles to find a place to eat their dinner in, and pass by twenty on the way nicer than the one they finally pick out. They'd better be doing sums in school, or grubbing weeds out of the garden, instead of playing 'frog in the meadow' around a fool British May-pole."

He looked around inquiringly as if he expected his practical listener to agree with him. But all the sympathy he got from the old miller was one of the innumerable proverbs he seemed to keep continually on tap. "'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,' Bud. Life is apt to be little but sums and grubbing for the youngsters by and by, so let them make the most of their May-days now."

The sequels of picnics are also polyhedral. Miss Anastasia, lingering at her front gate in the early twilight, that she might enjoy to the last moment the orchard odours that filled all the balcony outdoors, heard the rattle of returning wheels. She had had a pleasant day, despite the tearful retrospection of the morning, for she had attended the great social function of the neighbourhood, the monthly missionary tea. It had brought immeasurable cheer, and now she was returning with a comfortable conviction that she was to be envied far above any of her neighbours. The consciousness of having on her best gown, of being the mistress of the trim little home to which she was going, of freedom from a hundred harassing cares that she had heard discussed that afternoon, all combined to make her supremely contented with her lot.

"Poor children," she sighed, as the tired, dirty little picnickers were lifted from the wagon across the road. "They look as if the game hadn't been worth the candle. I'm glad that I've outgrown such things."

Perkins's oldest, having soaked long in the cold creek, and sampled every dinner-basket with reckless abandon till he could sample no more, sat doubled up in the straw of the wagon-bed. He was white about the mouth, and had he been called upon to debate the time-worn question, "Resolved, that there is more pleasure in pursuit than in possession," the tarts and sandwiches of that day's picnic would have furnished several dozen indisputable arguments for the affirmative.

The dishevelled little queen sat beside him, tired out by her day's wild frolic, with starch and frizzes all gone.

As she was lifted over the wheel, and put down on the doorstep, a limp little bunch of woe, Miss Anastasia heard her bewailing her fate. She had lost the stars from her crown, the borrowed daisies that must be reckoned for on the morrow. The amused listener smiled to herself under cover of the twilight, as she heard Bowser's awkward attempts at consolation, for all the comfort that he could muster was an old saw learned from the miller: "Never mind, Cora, pa's mighty sorry for his little girl. But you know:

"'When a man buys meat he buys bone,
And when he buys land he buys stone.
You must take the bad with the good.'"

Chapter VIII

THERE is something in the air of June that stirs even insentient things with a longing to blossom. Staid old universities blaze out with the gala colours of commencement week, when the month of roses is ushered in, and on every college campus the social life of the student year comes to flower in the crowning exercises of class-day.

One wonders sometimes if the roots, burrowing underground in order to fill the bush overhead with myriads of roses, have any share in the thrill of success at having produced such a wealth of sweetness and beauty. But there need be no surmise about college florescence. Faculties may beam with complacency on their yearly cluster of full-blown graduates, the very walls of the gray old universities may thrill as they echo the applause of admiring audiences, but the greatest pride is not felt within the college town itself where the student life centres. It is back in the roots that have made college life possible. Back in some parental existence that daily sinks itself farther into the commonplace in order that some son or daughter may blossom into the culture of arts and belles-lettres. The Jacqueminot that flaunts its glory over the garden wall may not sweeten life for the fibres that lift it, but the valedictorian who flaunts his diploma and degree in the classic halls of some sea-board college may be glorifying the air of some little backwoods village a thousand miles inland. Even the Cross-Roads are bound with a network of such far-reaching roots to the commencements of Harvard and Yale.

It was Cy Akers's boy who came home this June, a little lifted up, perhaps, by the honours he had won; thoroughly impressed with the magnitude of his own knowledge and the meagreness of other peoples', but honestly glad at first to get back to the old home and neighbours.

The family pride in him was colossal. Old Cy encouraged his visits to the Cross-Roads store, inventing excuses for going which he considered the acme of subtle diplomacy. But his motives were as transparent as a child's. Illiterate himself, he wanted his neighbours to see what college had done for his boy in the way of raising him head and shoulders above them all. And the boy was good-naturedly compliant. He was as willing to show off mentally as he had been to lend a hand in the wheat harvest, and demonstrate what football training had done for him in the way of developing muscle.

Like Perkins's oldest, his education had begun with the primer of the Cross-Roads. He could remember the time when he, too, had ignorantly believed this to be the only store in the universe, and wondered if there were enough people living to consume all its contents. Now he smiled to himself when he looked around the stuffy little room and saw the same old butter firkins crowding the—apparently—same old calico and crockery, and looked up at the half-dozen hams still swinging sociably from the low rafters.

Time had been, too, when he thought the men who gossiped around its rusty stove on Saturday afternoons knew everything. Like Perkins's oldest, he had unquestioningly formulated the creed of his boyhood from their conversations, and he smiled again when he recalled how he had been warped in those early days by their prejudices and short-sighted opinions.

The smile extended outwardly when he walked into their midst to find them repeating the same old saws about the weather, and the way the country was going to the dogs. Yet in his salad days these time-honoured prognostications had seemed to him the wisdom of seers and sages.

Probably it was the thought that he had travelled far beyond the narrow confines of the Cross-Roads that gave his conversation a patronising tone. But the Cross-Roads refused to be patronised. He learned that on the day of his arrival. It was the first lesson of a valuable post-graduate course. That a man away from home may be Mister Robert Harrison Hamilton Akers, with all the A. B.'s and LL. D.'s after his name that an educational institution can bestow; but as soon as he sets foot again on his native heath, where he has gone through the vicissitudes of boyhood, he is shorn of titles and degrees as completely as Samson was shorn of his locks, and his strength straightway falls from him. He is nobody but Bobby Akers, and everybody remembers when he robbed birds' nests, and stole grapes, and played hooky, and was a little freckle-faced, snub-nosed neighbourhood terror. A man cannot maintain his importance long in the face of such reminiscences. No amount of university culture is going to lay the ghost of youthful indiscretions, and he might as well put his patronising proclivities in his pocket. They will not be tolerated by those who have patted him on the head when he wore roundabouts.

It was Saturday afternoon, but it was also the and of the wheat-harvest, and the men were afield who usually gathered on the Cross-Roads porch to round up the week over their pipes and plugs of chewing tobacco. Only three chairs were tilted back against the wall, and on these, with their heels caught over the front rungs, sat Bowser, the old miller, and Robert Akers.

The whirr of reaping machines came faintly up from the fields and near by, where several acres of waving yellow grain still stood uncut, a bob-white whistled cheerily. No one was talking. "Knee-deep in June" would have voiced the thoughts of the trio, for they were "Jes' a sort o' lazein' there," with their hats pulled over their eyes, enjoying to the utmost the perfect afternoon. Every breeze was redolent with red clover and wild honeysuckle, and vibrant with soothing country sounds.

"Who is that coming up the road?" asked the miller, as a team and wagon appeared over the brow of the hill.

"They wabble along like Duncan Smith's horses," answered the storekeeper, squinting his eyes for a better view. "Yes, that's who it is. That's Dunk on the top of the load. Moving again, bless Pete!"

As the wagon creaked slowly nearer, a feather bed came into view, surmounting a motley collection of household goods, and perched upon it, high above the jangle of her jolting tins and crockery, sat Mrs. Duncan Smith. A clock and a looking-glass lay in her lap, and, like a wise virgin, in her hands she carefully bore the family lamp. From frequent and anxious turnings of her black sunbonnet, it was evident that she was keeping her weather eye upon the chicken-coop, which was bound to the tail-board of the wagon by an ancient clothes-line.

A flop-eared dog trotted along under the wagon. Squeezed in between a bureau and the feather bed, two shock-headed children sat on a flour barrel, clutching each other at every lurch of the crowded van to keep from losing their balance.

"Howdy, Dunk!" called the storekeeper, as the dusty pilgrims halted in front of the porch. "Where are you bound now?"

"Over to the old Neal place," answered the man, handing the reins to his wife, and climbing stiffly down over the wheel. Going around to the back of the wagon, he unstrapped a kerosene can which swung from the pole underneath.

"Gimme a gallon of coal-ile, Jim," he said. "I don't want to be left in the dark the first night, anyway. It takes awhile to git your bearings in a strange place, and it's mighty confusing to butt agin a half-open door where you've always been used to a plain wall, and it hurts like fire to bark your shins on a rocking-chair when you're steering straight for bed, and hain't no idee it's in the road. This time it'll be a little more so than usual," he added, handing over the can. "The house backs up agin a graveyard, you know. Sort o' spooky till you git used to it."

"What on earth did you move there for?" asked Bowser. "They say the place is ha'nted."

"To my mind the dead make better neighbours than the living," came the tart reply from the depths of the black sunbonnet. "At any rate, they mind their own business."

"Oh, come now, Mrs. Smith," began Bowser, good-naturedly. "Maybe you've been unfortunate in your choice of neighbours."

"I've had a dozen different kinds," came the emphatic answer. "This'll make the twelfth move in eight years, so you can't say that I'm speaking from hearsay."

"Twelve moves in eight years!" exclaimed Bowser, as the wagon went lurching and creaking on through the dust. "There's gipsy blood in that Dunk Smith, sure as you live. Seems like that family can't be satisfied anywhere; always thinking they can better themselves by changing, and always getting out of the frying-pan into the fire. There wa'n't no well in the place where they settled when they was first married, and they had to carry water from a spring. The muscle put into packing that water up-hill those six months would have dug a cistern, but they were too short-sighted to see that. They jest played Jack and Jill as long as they could stand it, and then moved to a place where there was a cistern already dug. But there wa'n't any fruit on that place. If they'd have set out trees right away they'd have been eating from orchards of their own planting by this time. But they thought it was easier to move to where one was already set out.

"Then when they got to a place where they had both fruit and water, it was low, and needed draining. The water settled around the house, and they all had typhoid that summer. Oh, they've spent enough energy packing up and moving on and settling down again in new places to have fixed the first one up to a queen's taste. They seem to be running a perpetual Home-seeker's Excursion. Well, such a life might suit some people, but it would never do for me."

"But such a life has some things in its favour," put in Rob Akers, always ready to debate any question that offered, for the mere pleasure of arguing. "It keeps a man from getting into a rut, and develops his ability to adapt himself to any circumstance. A man who hangs his hat on the same peg for fifty or sixty years gets to be so dependent on that peg that he would be uncomfortable if it were suddenly denied him. Now Dunk Smith can never become such a slave to habit. Then, too, moving tends to leave a man more unhampered. He gradually gets rid of everything in his possessions but the essentials. He hasn't a garret full of old claptraps, as most people have who never move from under their ancestral roof-trees. You saw for yourself, one wagon holds all his household goods and gods.