s she brought them and
the word was passed that the pretty red-headed girl at the last stop
before you got to Ryeville would furnish a basket supper at a
reasonable figure and soon almost every man on the line was eager to
become one of her customers.

The first supper was difficult because she was determined to have it
absolutely perfect, and her mother would insist upon getting in her
way, offering various suggestions that might save a tenth of a cent.

"I tell you, Mumsy, I am not saving but making. Please sit down in
this chair by the table, while I behave like the man in the lunatic
asylum who thought he was a steam engine. I'm afraid I might get off
the track and run over you. If you just stay still in one spot I'll
get through. I can't go over you, I can't go around you and I can't go
under you.

"There's the whistle blowing for two stops before ours and I'm ready.
Hurrah for a fortune, Mumsy!" and with a kiss Judith was off, bearing
a basket in one hand and a tin cooler of buttermilk in the other.

The Bucks' farm was a triangle, bounded on two sides by converging
roads and the other by the pasture lands of Buck Hill. The trolley
line skirted the back of the farm, but turned sharply toward Ryeville
before reaching the corner where the two roads met. The track curved
about five hundred feet beyond the location of the stop where Judith
had promised to meet the car with the suppers. There was a short cut
from the rear of the house and Judith always took short cuts. Through
the orchard, down the hill, across a stream, up the hill, skirting a
blackberry thicket, through a grove of beeches, dark and peaceful with
lengthening shadows falling on mossy banks, went the girl. She stopped
a moment in the grove and looked out across the fertile
country--everywhere more fertile than the Buck farm but nowhere more
beautiful, she thought.

"I wish I had time to stop here longer," she sighed, putting down her
basket and patting a great beech tree. "Thank goodness the Bucks were
too lazy to cut you down and the Knights too slow." The honk of an
automobile horn startled her. A seven-seated passenger car was coming
down the road and in the distance could be seen the approaching
trolley.

"Got to run after all," she cried. "That's what I get for making love
to a tree." She flew along the path by the fence and reached the small
station before the trolley slowed down for the stop. Breathless but
triumphant she stood, large bas