October Vagabonds — Chapters 13-16

And, though my knapsack already weighed eighteen pounds, I could not resist the call of a cheap edition of Wordsworth in a drug-store at Warsaw, a charming little town embosomed among hills and orchards, where we arrived, dreamy with country air, at the end of the day.

CHAPTER XIII FELLOW WAYFARERS

With the morn our way still lay among apples and honey, hives and orchards; a land of prosperous farms, sumptuous rolling downs, rich woodland, sheep, more pigs, more apple-barrels and velvety sunshine.

The old ruined houses had ceased, and the country had taken on a more generous, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed aspect.

Nature was preparing for one of her big Promised Land effects.

We were coming to the valley of the Genesee River.

We made a comparison of two kinds of prosperity in the look of a landscape.

Some villages and farms suggest smugness in their prosperity.

They have a model-farm, business-like, well-regulated, up-to-date, company-financed air, suggesting such modern agricultural terms as "ensilage," "irrigation" and "fertilizer."

Other villages and farms, while just as well-kept and well-to-do, have, so to say, a something romantic about their prosperity, a bounteous, ruddy, golden-age look about them, as though Nature herself had been the farmer and they had ruddied and ripened out of her own unconscious abundance--the difference between a row of modern box beehives and the old thatched-cottage kind.

The countryside of the Genesee valley has the romantic prosperous look.

Its farms and villages look like farms and villages in picture-books, and the country folk we met seemed happy and gay and kind, such as those one reads of in William Morris's romances of the golden age.

As from time to time we exchanged greetings with them, we were struck with their comely health and blithe ways--particularly with their fine teeth, as they laughed us the time of day, or stopped their wagons to gossip a moment with the two outlandish packmen--the very teeth one would expect in an apple-country.

Perhaps they came of so much sweet commerce with apples!

The possessor of a particularly fine display hailed us as he drove by in an empty wagon, at the tail of which trailed a long orchard ladder, and asked us if we would care for a lift.

Now it happened that his suggestion came like a voice from heaven for poor Colin, one of whose shoes had been casting a gloom over our spirits for several miles.

So we accepted with alacrity, and, really, riding felt quite good for a change!

Our benefactor was a bronzed, handsome young fellow, just through Cornell, he told us, and proud of his brave college, as all Cornell men are.

He had chosen apple-farming for his career, and, naturally, seemed quite happy about it; lived on his farm near by with his mother and sister, and was at the moment out on the quest of four apple-packers for his harvesting, these experts being at a premium at this season.

We rattled along gaily in the broad afternoon sunshine, exchanging various human information, from apple-packing to New York theatres, after the manner of the companionable soul of man, and I hope he liked us as well as we liked him.

One piece of information was of particular interest to Colin, the whereabouts of one "Billy the Cobbler," a character of the neighbourhood, who would fix Colin's shoe for him, and, incidentally, if he was in the mood, give us a musical and dramatic entertainment into the bargain.

At length our ways parted, and, with cheery good-byes and good wishes, our young friend went rattling along, leaving in our hearts a warm feeling of the brotherhood of man--sometimes.

He had let us down close by the "High Banks," the rumour of which had been in our ears for some miles, and presently the great effect Nature had been preparing burst on our gaze with a startling surprise.

The peaceful pastoral country was suddenly cloven in twain by a gigantic chasm, the Genesee River, dizzy depths below, picturesquely flowing between Grand Cañon rock effects, shaggy woods clothing the precipitous limestone, and small forests growing far down in the broad bed of the river, with here and there checkerboard spaces of cultivated land, gleaming, smooth and green, amid all the spectacular savageness--soft, cozy spots of verdure nestling dreamily in the hollow of the giant rocky hand.

The road ran close to the edge of the chasm, and the sublimity was with us, laying its hush upon us, for the rest of the afternoon.

Appropriate to her Jove-like mood, Nature had planted stern thickets of oak-trees along the rocky edge, and "the acorns of our lord of Chaonia" crunched beneath our feet as we walked on.

After a while, sure enough we came upon "Billy the Cobbler," seated at his bench in a little shop at the beginning of a straggle of houses, alone, save for his cat, at the sleepy end of afternoon.

We had understood that he had been crippled in some cruel accident of machinery, and was hampered in the use of his legs.

But, unless in a certain philosophic sweetness on his big, happy face, there was no sign of the cripple about his burly, broad-shouldered personality.

He was evidently meant to be a giant, and was what one might call the bo'sun type, bluff, big-voiced and merry, with a boyish laugh, large, twinkling eyes, a trifle wistful, and the fine teeth of the district.

"Well, boys," said he, looking up from his work with a smile, "and what can I do for you?

Walking, eh?

--to New York!"

and he whistled, as every one did when they learned our mysterious business.

Then, taking Colin's shoe in his hand, he commenced to pound upon that instrument of torture, talking gaily the while.

Presently he asked, "Do you care about music?"

and on our eagerly agreeing that we did, "All right," he said, "we'll close the shop for a few minutes and have some."

Then, moving around on his seat, like some heroic half-figure bust on its pedestal, he rummaged among the litter of leather and tools at his side, and produced a guitar from its baize bag, also a mouth organ, which by some ingenious wire arrangement he fastened around his neck, so that he might press his lips upon it, leaving his hands free for the guitar.

Then, "Ready?"

said he, and, applying himself simultaneously to the guitar and the harmonica, off he started with a quite electrical gusto into a spirited fandango that made the little shop dance and rattle with merriment.

You would have said that a whole orchestra was there, such a volume and variety of musical sound did Billy contrive to evoke from his two instruments.

"There!"

he said, with a humorous chuckle, pushing the harmonica aside from his mouth, "what do you think of that for an overture?"

He had completely hypnotized us with his infectious high spirits, and we were able to applaud him sincerely, for this lonely cobbler of shoes was evidently a natural well of music, and was, besides, no little of an executant.

"Now I'll give you an imitation of grand opera," he said; and then he launched into the drollest burlesque of a fashionable tenor and a prima-donna, as clever as could be.

He was evidently a born mime as well as a musician, and presently delighted us with some farmyard imitations, and one particularly quaint impersonation, "an old lady singing with false teeth," sent us into fits of laughter.

"You ought to go into vaudeville," we both said spontaneously, with that vicious modern instinct to put private gifts to professional uses, and then Billy, with shy pride, admitted that he did do a little now and again in a professional way at harvest balls (we thought of Sheldon Center) and the like.

"Perhaps you might like one of my professional letter-heads," he said, handing us one apiece.

I think probably the reader would like one, too.

You must imagine it in the original, with fancy displayed professional type, regular "artiste" style, and a portrait of Billy, with his two instruments, in one corner.

And "see thou mock him not," gentle reader!

_King of Them All BILLY WILLIAMS

THE KING OF ALL IMITATORS

Producing in Rapid Succession A GRAND REPERTOIRE

of Imitations and Impersonations Consisting of_: Minstrel Bands, Circus Bands, Killing Pigs, Cat Greeting Her Kitten, Barn-Yard of Hens and Roosters, Opera Singers with Guitar, Whistling with Guitar, Old Lady Singing with False Teeth, Cow and Calf, Harmonica with the Guitar, Arab Song, Trombone Solo with the Guitar.

Yes!

"See thou mock him not," gentle reader, for Billy is no subject for any man's condescension.

We were in his company scarcely an hour, but we went away with a great feeling of respect and tenderness for him, and we hope some day to drop in on him again, and hear his music and his quaint, manly wisdom.

"All alone in the world, Billy?"

A shade of sadness passed over his face, and was gone again, as he smilingly answered, stroking the cat that purred and rubbed herself against his shoulder.

"Just puss and me and the guitar," he said.

"The happiest of families.

Ah!

Music's a great thing of a lonely evening."

And a sense of the brave loneliness of Billy's days swept over me as we shook his strong hand, and he gave us a cheery godspeed on our way.

I am convinced that Billy could earn quite a salary on the vaudeville stage;

but--no!

he is better where he is, sitting there at his bench, with his black cat and his guitar and his singing, manly soul.

The twilight was rapidly thickening as we left Billy, once more bent over his work, and, the fear of "supper-time" in our hearts, we pushed on at extra speed toward our night's lodging at Mount Morris.

The oak-trees gloomed denser on our right as we plowed along a villainously sandy road.

Labourers homing from the day's work greeted us now and again in the dimness, and presently one of these, plodding up behind us, broke forth into conversation: "Ben-a carry pack-a lik-a dat-a--forty-two months--army--ol-a country," said the voice out of the darkness.

It was an Italian labourer on his way to supper, interested in our knapsacks.

"You're an Italian?"

"Me come from Pal-aer-mo."

The little chap was evidently in a talkative mood, and I nudged Colin to do the honours of the conversation.

"Pal-aer-mo?

Indeed!"

said Colin.

"Fine city, I guess."

"Been-a Pal-aer-mo?"

asked the Italian eagerly.

Colin couldn't say that he had.

"Great city, Pal-aer-mo," continued our friend, "great theatre--cost sixteen million dollars."

There is nothing like a walking-trip for gathering information of this kind.

The Italian went on to explain that this country was a poor substitute for the "ol-a country."

"This country--rough country.

In this country me do rough-a work," he explained apologetically; "in Pal-aer-mo do polit-a work."

And he accentuated his statement by a vicious side spit upon the American soil.

It transpired that the "polit-a work" on which he had been engaged in Pal-aer-mo had been waiting in a restaurant.

And so the poor soul chattered on, touching, not unintelligently, in his absurd English, on American politics, capital and labour, the rich and the poor.

The hard lot of the poor man in America, and--"Pal-aer-mo," made the recurring burden of his talk, through which, a pathetic undertone, came to us a sense of the native poetry of his race.

Did he ever expect to return to Palermo?

we asked him as we parted.

"Ah!

many a night me dream of Pal-aer-mo," he called back, as, striking into a by-path, he disappeared in the darkness.

And then we came to a great iron bridge, sternly silhouetted in the sunset.

On either side rose cliffs of darkness, and beneath, like sheets of cold moonlight, flowed the Genesee, a Dantesque effect of jet and silver, Stygian in its intensity and indescribably mournful.

The banks of Acheron can not be more wildly _funèbre_, and it was companionable to hear Colin's voice mimicking out of the darkness: "In this country me do rough-a work.

In Pal-aer-mo do polit-a work!"

"Poor chap!"

I said, after a pause, thinking of our friend from Pal-aer-mo.

"Do you know Hafiz, Colin?"

I continued.

"There is an ode of his that came back to me as our poor Italian was talking.

I think I will say it to you.

It is just the time and place for it."

"Do," said Colin.

And then I repeated: _"At sunset, when the eyes of exiles fill, And distance makes a desert of the heart, And all the lonely world grows lonelier still, I with the other exiles go apart, And offer up the stranger's evening prayer.

My body shakes with weeping as I pray, Thinking on all I love that are not there, So desolately absent far away-- My Love and Friend, and my own land and home.

O aching emptiness of evening skies!

O foolish heart, what tempted thee to roam So far away from the Beloved's eyes!

To the Beloved's country I belong-- I am a stranger in this foreign place;

Strange are its streets, and strange to me its tongue;

Strange to the stranger each familiar face.

'Tis not my city!

Take me by the hand, Divine protector of the lonely ones, And lead me back to the Beloved's land-- Back to my friends and my companions O wind that blows from Shiraz, bring to me A little dust from my Beloved's street;

Send Hafiz something, love, that comes from thee, Touched by thy hand, or trodden by thy feet."

_ "My!

but that makes one feel lonesome," was Colin's comment.

"I wonder if there will be any mail from the folk at Mount Morris."

CHAPTER XIV THE OLD LADY OF THE WALNUTS AND OTHERS

What manner of men we were and what our business was, thus wandering along the highroads with packs on our backs and stout sticks in our hands, was matter for no little speculation, and even suspicion, to the rural mind.

We did not seem to fit in with any familiar classification of vagabond.

We might be peddlers, or we might be "hoboes," but there was a disquieting uncertainty about us, and we felt it necessary occasionally to make reassuring explanations.

Once or twice we found no opportunity to do this, as, for instance, one sinister, darksome evening, we stood in hesitation at a puzzling cross-road--near Dansville, I think--and awaited the coming of an approaching buggy from which to ask the way.

It was driven by two ladies, who, on our making a signal of distress to them, immediately whipped up with evident alarm, and disappeared in a flash.

Dear things!

they evidently anticipated a hold-up, and no doubt arrived home with a breathless tale of two suspicious-looking characters hanging about the neighbourhood.

On another occasion, we had been seated awhile under a walnut tree growing near a farm, and scattering its fruitage half across the highroad.

Colin had been anointing his suffering foot, and, as I told him, looked strongly reminiscent of a certain famous corn-cure advertisement.

Meanwhile, I had been once more quoting Virgil: "The walnut in the woodland attires herself in wealth of blossom and bends with scented boughs," when there approached with slow step an old, white-haired lady, at once gentle and severe in appearance, accompanied by a younger lady.

When they had arrived in front of us, the old lady in measured tones of sorrow rather than anger, said: "We rather needed those walnuts--" Dear soul!

she evidently thought that we had been filling our knapsacks with her nuts, and it took some little astonished expostulation on our part to convince her that we hadn't. This affront seemed to sink no little into Colin's sensitive Latin soul--and they were public enough walnuts, anyway, scattered, as they were, across the public road!

But Colin couldn't get over it for some time, and I suspected that he was the more sensitive from his recently--owing, doubtless, to his distinguished Gallic appearance--having been profanely greeted by some irreverent boys with the word "Spaghetti!"

However, there was balm for our wounded feelings a little farther along the road, when a companionable old farmer greeted us with: "Well, boys!

out for a walk?

It's easy seeing you're no tramps."

Colin's expression was a study in gratitude.

The farmer was a fine, soldierly old fellow, who told me that he was half English, too, on his father's side.

"But my mother," he added, "was a good blue-bellied Yankee."

We lured him on to using that delightfully quaint expression again before we left him; and we also learned from him valuable information as to the possibilities of lunch farther along the road, for we were in a lonely district with no inns, and it was Sunday.

In regard to lunch, I suppose that in prosaically paying our way for bed and board as we fared along we fell short of the Arcadian theory of walking-tours in which the wayfarer, like a mendicant friar, takes toll of lunch and dinner from the hospitable farmer of sentimental legend, and sleeps for choice in barns, hayricks or hedgesides.

Now, sleeping out of doors in October, if you have ever tried it, is a very different thing from sleeping out of doors in June, and as for rural hospitality--well, if you are of a sensitive constitution you shrink from obtruding yourself, an alien apparition, upon the embarrassed and embarrassing rural domesticities.

Besides, to be quite honest, rural table-talk, except in Mr. Hardy's novels or pastoral poetry, is, to say the least, lacking in variety.

Indeed, if the truth must be told, the conversation of country people, generally speaking, and an occasional, very occasional, character or oddity apart, is undeniably dull, and I hope it will not be imputed to me for hardness of heart that, after some long-winded colloquy or endless reminiscence, sententious and trivial, I have thought that Gray's famous line should really have been written--"the long and tedious annals of the poor."

But my heart smites me with ingratitude toward some kindly memories as I write that--memories of homely welcome, simple and touching and dignified.

Surely I am not writing so of the genial farmer on whom we came one lunch hour as he was stripping corn in his yard.

"Missus," he called to the house a few yards away, "can you find any lunch for two good-looking fellows here?"

The housewife came to the door, scanned us for a second, and replied in the affirmative.

As we sat down to table, our host bowed his head and said a simple grace for the bacon and cabbage, pumpkin-pie, cheese and tea we were about to receive; and the unexpected old-fashioned rite, too seldom encountered nowadays, came on me with a fresh beauty and impressiveness, which made me feel that its discontinuance is a real loss of gracious ritual in our lives, and perhaps even more.

Thus this simple farmer's board seemed sensitively linked with the far-away beginnings of time.

Of all our religious symbolism, the country gods and the gods of the hearth and the household seem actual, approachable presences, and the saying of grace before meat was a beautiful, fitting reminder of that mysterious, invisible care and sustenance of our lives, which no longer find any recognition in our daily routine: _Above all, worship thou the gods, and bring great Ceres her yearly offerings_.

Another such wayside meal and another old couple live touchingly in our memories.

We were still in the broad, sun-swept valley of the Genesee, our road lying along the edge of the wide, reed-grown flats and water-meadows, bounded on the north by rolling hills.

On our left hand, parallel with the road, ran a sort of willowed moat banked by a grass-grown causeway, a continuous narrow mound, somewhat higher than the surrounding country, and cut through here and there with grass-grown gullies, the whole suggesting primeval earthworks and excavations.

So the old Roman roads run, grassy and haunted and choked with underbrush, in the lonelier country districts of England.

We were curious as to the meaning of this causeway, and learned at length that here was all that remained of the old Genesee Canal.

Thirty years ago, this moat had brimmed with water, and barges had plied their sleepy traffic between Dansville and Rochester.

But the old order had changed, and a day had come when the dike had been cut through, the lazy water let out into the surrounding flats, and the old waterway left to the willows and the wild-flowers, the mink and the musk-rat.

Only thirty years ago--yet to-day Nature has so completely taken it all back to herself that the hush of a long-vanished antiquity is upon it, and the turfy burial mound of some Hengist and Horsa could not be more silent.

This old fosse seemed to strike the somewhat forgotten, out-of-the-world note of the surrounding country.

Picturesque to the eye, with bounteous green prospects and smooth, smiling hills, it was not, we were told, as prosperous as it looked.

For some vague reason, the tides of agricultural prosperity had ebbed from that spacious sunlit vale.

A handsome old trapper, who sat at his house door smoking his pipe and looking across the green flats, set down the cause to the passing of the canal.

Ah, yes!

it was possible for him, thirty years ago, to make the trip to Rochester and back by the canal, and bring home a good ten dollars; but now--well, every one in the valley was poor, except the man whose beehives we had seen on the hillside half-a-mile back.

He had made no less than a thousand dollars out of his honey this last season.

He was an old bachelor, too, like himself.

There were no less than five bachelors in the valley--five old men without a woman to look after them.

"--or bother them," the old chap added humorously, relighting his pipe.

Mrs. Mulligan, half a mile farther up the valley, was the only woman thereabouts; and she, by the way, would give us some lunch.

We could say that he had sent us.

So we left the old trapper to his pipe and his memories, and went in search of Mrs. Mulligan.

Presently a poor little house high up on the hillside caught our eye, and we made toward it.

As we were nearing the door, a dog, evidently not liking our packs, sprang out at us, and from down below in the marshy flats floated the voice of a man calling to us.

"Get out o' that!"

hailed the voice.

"There's nothing there for you."

Poor Colin!

We were evidently taken for tramps once more.

However, undaunted by this reception, we reached the cottage door, and at our knock appeared a very old, but evidently vigorous, woman.

"Is this Mrs. Mulligan's house?"

Her name on the lips of two strangers brought a surprised smile to her face--a pleasant feeling of importance, even notoriety, no doubt--and she speedily made us welcome, and, with many apologies, set before us the cold remains of lunch which had been over an hour or two ago--cold squash, pumpkin pie, cheese and milk.

It was too bad we were late, for they had had a chicken for dinner, and had sent the remains of it to a friend down the road,--our trapper, no doubt,--and if the fire hadn't gone out she would have made us some tea.

Now, cold squash is not exactly an inflammatory diet, but we liked the old lady so much, she had such a pleasant, motherly way with her, and such an entertaining, wise and even witty tongue, that we decided that cold squash, with her as hostess, was better than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.

Presently the door opened and the good man entered, he who had called to us from the marsh--a tall, emaciated old man, piteously thin, and old, and work-weary to look on, but with a keen, bright eye in his head, and something of a proud air about his ancient figure.

It seemed cruel to think of his old bones having still to go on working, but our two old people, who seemed pathetically fond of each other, were evidently very poor, like the rest of the valley.

The old man excused himself for his salutation of us--but there were so many dangerous characters about, and the old folk shook their heads and told of the daring operations of mysterious robbers in the neighbourhood.

In their estimation, the times were generally unsafe, and lawless characters rife in the land.

We looked around at the pathetic poverty of the place--and wondered why they should disquiet themselves.

Poor souls!

there was little left to rob them of, save the fluttering remnants of their mortal breath.

But, poor as they were, they had their telephone,--a fact that struck us paradoxically in many a poor cabin as we went along.

Yes!

had they a mind, they could call up the White House, that instant, or the Waldorf-Astoria.

We spoke of our old trapper, and the old lady smiled.

"Those are his socks I've been darning for him," she said.

So the cynical old bachelor was taken care of by the good angel, woman, after all!

Trapping was about all there was to do now in the valley, she said.

A

mink brought seven dollars, a musk-rat thirty cents.

Our old bachelor had made as much as eighteen dollars in two days--one day several years ago.

The old man had told us this himself.

It was evidently quite a piece of history in the valley, quite a local legend.

CHAPTER XV THE MAN AT DANSVILLE

At Dansville we fell in with a man after our own hearts.

Fortunately for himself and his friends, he is unaware of the simple fact that he is a poet.

We didn't tell him, either--though we longed to.

He was standing outside his prosperous-looking planing-mill, at about half-past eight of a dreaming October morning.

Inside, the saws were making that droning, sweet-smelling, sawdust noise that made Colin think of "Adam Bede."

The willows and button-wood trees at the back of the workshops were still smoking with sunlit mist, and the quiet, massive, pretty water looked like a sleepy mirror, as it softly flooded along to its work on the big, dripping wheels.

To our left a great hill, all huge and damp, glittering with gossamers, and smelling of restless yellow leaves, shouldered the morning sky.

Then, turning away from talk with three or four workmen, standing at his office door, he saluted the two apparitional figures, so oddly passing along the muddy morning road.

"Out for a walk, boys?"

he called.

He was a handsome man of about forty-three, with a romantic scar slashed down his left cheek, a startling scar that must have meant hideous agony to him, and yet, here in the end, had made his face beautiful, by the presence in it of a spiritual conquest.

"How far are you walking?

--you are not going so far as my little river here, I'll bet--" And then we understood that we were in the presence of romantic conversation, and we listened with a great gladness.

"Yes!

who would think that this little, quiet, mill-race is on her way to the Gulf of Mexico!"

We looked at the little reeded river, so demure in her morning mists, so discreet and hushed among her willows, and in our friend's eyes, and by the magic of his fanciful tongue, we saw her tripping along to dangerous conjunctions with resounding rock-bedded streams, adventurously taking hands with swirling, impulsive floods, fragrant with water-flowers and laden with old forests, and at length, through the strange, starlit hills, sweeping out into some moonlit estuary of the all-enfolding sea.

"Aren't you glad we walked, Colin?"

I said, a mile or two after.

"You are, of course, a great artist; but I don't remember you ever having a thought quite so fine and romantic as that, do you?"

"How strange it must be," said Colin, after a while, "to have beauty--beautiful thoughts, beautiful pictures--merely as a recreation;

not as one's business, I mean.

And the world is full of people who have no need to sell their beautiful thoughts!"

CHAPTER XVI IN WHICH WE CATCH UP WITH SUMMER

Some eminent wayfarers--one peculiarly beloved--have discoursed on the romantic charm of maps.

But they have dwelt chiefly on the suggestiveness of them before the journey: these unknown names of unknown places, in types of mysteriously graduated importance--what do they stand for?

These mazy lines, some faint and wayward as a hair, and some straight and decided as a steel track--whence and whither do they lead?

I love the map best when the journey is done--when I can pore on its lines as into the lined face of some dear friend with whom I have travelled the years, and say--here this happened, here that befell!

This almost invisible dot is made of magic rocks and is filled with the song of rapids; this infinitesimal fraction of "Scale five miles to the inch" is a haunted valley of purple pine-woods, and the moon rising, and the lonely cry of a sheep that has lost her little one somewhere in the folds of the hills.

Here, where is no name, stands an old white church with a gilded cross, among little white houses huddled together under a bluff.

In yonder garden the priest's cassock and trousers are hanging sacrilegiously on a clothes-line, and you can just see a tiny graveyard away up on the hillside almost hidden in the trees.

Even sacred vestments must be laundered by earthly laundresses, yet somehow it gives one a shock to see sacred vestments out of the sanctuary, profanely displayed on a clothes-line.

It is as though one should turn the sacred chalice into a tea-pot.

A priest's trousers on a clothes-line might well be the beginning of atheism.

But I hope there were no such fanciful deductive minds in that peaceful hamlet, and that the faithful there can withstand even so profound a trial of faith.

If it had been my own creed that those vestments represented, I should have been shaken, I confess; and, as it was, I felt a vague pain of disillusionment, of an indignity done to the unseen; as, whatever the creed, living or dead, may be, I always feel in those rooms often affected by artistic people, furnished with the bric-a-brac of religions, indeed not their own, but, none the less, once or even now, the living religions of other people--rooms in which forgotten, or merely foreign, deities are despitefully used for decoration, and a crucifix and a Buddha and an African idol alike parts of the artistic furniture.

But, no doubt, it is to consider too curiously to consider so, and the good priest whose cassock and trousers have occasioned these reflections would smilingly prick my fancies, after the dialectic manner of his calling, and say that his trousers on the clothes-line were but a humble reminder to the faithful how near to the daily life of her children, how human at once as well as divine, is Mother Church.

A cross, naturally, marks the spot where we saw those priest's trousers on the line; but there are no crosses for a hundred places of memorable moments of our journey; they must go without memorial even in this humble record, and Colin and I must be content to keep wayside shrines for them in our hearts.

How insignificant, on the map, looks the little stretch of some seventeen miles from Dansville to Cohocton, yet I feel that one would need to erect a cathedral to represent the perfect day of golden October wayfaring it stands for, as on the weather-beaten map spread out before me on my writing-table, as Colin and I so often spread it out under a tree by some lonely roadside, I con the place-names that to us "bring a perfume in the mention."

It was a district of quaint, romantic-sounding names, and it fully justified that fantastic method of choosing our route by the sound of the names of places, which I confessed to the reader on an earlier page: Wayland--Patchin's Mills--Blood's Depôt--Cohocton.

And to north and south of our route were names such as Ossian, Stony Brook Glen, Loon Lake, Rough & Ready, Doly's Corners, and Neil Creek.

I confess that there was a Perkinsville to go through--a beautiful spot, too, for which one felt that sort of aesthetic pity one feels for a beautiful girl married to a man, say, of the name of Podgers.

Perkinsville!

It was as though you said--the beautiful Mrs. Podgers.

But there was consolation in the sound of Wayland, with its far call to Wayland's smithy and Walter Scott.

And--Cohocton!

The name to me had a fine Cromwellian ring; and Blood's Depôt--what a truculent sound to that!

--if you haven't forgotten the plumed dare-devil cavalier who once made a dash to steal the king's regalia from the Tower.

Again--Loon Lake.

Can you imagine two more lonesome wailing words to make a picture with?

But--Cohocton.

How oddly right my absurd instinct had been about that--and, shall we ever forget the unearthly beauty of the evening which brought us at dark to the quaint little operatic-looking village, deep and snug among the solemn, sleeping hills?

The day had been one of those days that come perhaps only in October--days of rich, languorous sunshine full of a mysterious contentment, days when the heart says, "My cup runneth over," and happy tears suddenly well to the eyes, as though from a deep overflowing sense of the goodness of God.

It was really Summer, with the fragrant mists of Autumn in her hair.

It had happened as we had hoped on starting out.

We had caught up with Summer on her way to New York, Summer all her golden self, though garlanded with wreaths of Autumn, and about her the swinging censers of burning weeds.

It was a wonderful valley we had caught her in, all rolling purple hills softly folding and unfolding in one continuous causeway; a narrow valley, and the hills were high and close and gentle, suggesting protection and abundance and never-ending peace.

Here and there the vivid green of Winter wheat struck a note of Spring amid all the mauves and ochres of dying things.

It was a day on which you had no wish to talk,--you were too happy,--wanted only to wander on and on as in a dream through the mellow vale--one of those days in which the world seems too good to be true, a day of which we feel, "This day can never come again."

It was like walking through the Twenty-third Psalm.

And, as it closed about us, as we came to our village at nightfall, and the sunshine, like a sinking lake of gold, grew softer and softer behind the uplands, the solid world of rock and tree, and stubble-field and clustered barns, seemed to be growing pure thought--nothing seemed left of it but spirit; and the hills had become as the luminous veil of some ineffable temple of the mysterious dream of the world.

"Puvis de Chavannes!"

said Colin to me in a whisper.

And later I tried to say better what I meant in this song: _Strange, at this still enchanted hour, How things in daylight hard and rough, Iron and stone and cruel power, Turn to such airy, starlit stuff!

Yon mountain, vast as Behemoth, Seems but a veil of silver breath;

And soundless as a flittering moth, And gentle as the face of death, Stands this stern world of rock and tree Lost in some hushed sidereal dream-- The only living thing a bird, The only moving thing a stream.

And, strange to think, yon silent star, So soft and safe amid the spheres-- Could we but see and hear so far-- Is made of thunder, too, and tears.

_