with the fences and trees whirling by, and the September landscape
flying on the wings of the wind. The chase leads past fields of
tasseled Indian corn, with yellowing thickly swathed ears, leaning
heavily from the stalk; past wheat-lands, the crops harvested and the
crab-grass having its day at last; past "woods-lots" and their black
shadows, and out again into the September sunshine; past rickety
little homes, not unlike Hollis's own, with tow-headed children,
exactly like his, standing with wide eyes, looking at the rush and
hurry of the pursuit--sometimes in the ill-kept yards a wood-fire is
burning under the boiling sorghum kettle, or beneath the branches of
the orchard near at hand a cider-mill is crushing the juice out of the
red and yellow, ripe and luscious apples. Homeward-bound prize cattle
are overtaken--a Durham bull, reluctantly permitting himself to be led
into a fence corner that the hunt may sweep by unobstructed, and
turning his proud blue-ribboned head angrily toward the riders as if
indignant that anything except him should absorb attention; a gallant
horse, with another floating blue streamer, bearing himself as
becometh a king's son; the chase comes near to crushing sundry
grunting porkers impervious to pride and glory in any worldly
distinctions of cerulean decorations, and at last is fain to draw up
and wait until a flock of silly over-dressed sheep, running in frantic
fear every way but the right way, can be gathered together and guided
to a place of safety.

And once more, forward; past white frame houses with porches, and
vine-grown verandas, and well-tended gardens, and groves of oak and
beech and hickory trees--"John Barleycorn" makes an ineffectual but
gallant struggle to get in at the large white gate of one of these
comfortable places, Squire Goodlet's home, but he is urged back into
the road, and again the pursuit sweeps on. Those blue mountains, the
long parallel ranges of Old Bear and his brothers, seem no more a
misty, uncertain mirage against the delicious indefinable tints of the
horizon. Sharply outlined they are now, with dark, irregular shadows
upon their precipitous slopes which tell of wild ravines, and
rock-lined gorges, and swirling mountain torrents, and great,
beetling, gray crags. A breath of balsams comes on the freshening
wind--the lungs expand to meet it. There is a new aspect in the scene;
a revivifying current thrills through the blood; a sudden ideal beauty
descends