t week----" I leaned
over toward Horace and whispered behind my hand--in just the way he
tells me the price he gets for his pigs.

"What!" he exclaimed.

Horace had long known that I was "a kind of literary feller," but his
face was now a study in astonishment.

"_What?_"

Horace scratched his head, as he is accustomed to do when puzzled, with
one finger just under the rim of his hat.

"Well, I vum!" said he.

Here I have been wandering all around Horace's barn--in the
snow--getting at the story I really started to tell, which probably
supports Horace's conviction that I am an impractical and unsubstantial
person. If I had the true business spirit I should have gone by the
beaten road from my house to Horace's, borrowed the singletree I went
for, and hurried straight home. Life is so short when one is after
dollars! I should not have wallowed through the snow, nor stopped at the
top of the hill to look for a moment across the beautiful wintry
earth--gray sky and bare wild trees and frosted farmsteads with homely
smoke rising from the chimneys--I should merely have brought home a
singletree--and missed the glory of life! As I reflect upon it now, I
believe it took me no longer to go by the fields than by the road; and
I've got the singletree as securely with me as though I had not looked
upon the beauty of the eternal hills, nor reflected, as I tramped, upon
the strange ways of man.

Oh, my friend, is it the settled rule of life that we are to accept
nothing not expensive? It is not so settled for me; that which is
freest, cheapest, seems somehow more valuable than anything I pay for;
that which is given better than that which is bought; that which passes
between you and me in the glance of an eye, a touch of the hand, is
better than minted money!

I found Horace upon the March day I speak of just coming out of his new
fruit cellar. Horace is a progressive and energetic man, a leader in
this community, and the first to have a modern fruit cellar. By this
means he ministers profitably to that appetite of men which craves most
sharply that which is hardest to obtain: he supplies the world with
apples in March.

It being a mild and sunny day, the door of the fruit cellar was open,
and as I came around the corner I had such of whiff of fragrance as I
cannot describe. It seemed as though the vials of the earth's most
precious odours had been broken there in Horace's yard! The smell of
ripe apples!

In the dusky