f 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 Depot--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. Po