on. The family could not quite go under water,
even with people of the Panjandrum persuasion, while there was such
a pair of prospective corks to float them as Mr. and Mrs. Dakie
Thayne.

The Panjandrum carriage had scarcely bowled away, when a little
buggy and a sorrel pony came up the road, and somebody alighted with
a brisk spring, slipped the rein with a loose knot through the
fence-rail at the corner, and came up one side of the two-plank
foot-walk that ran around the Horseshoe; somebody who had come home
unexpectedly, to take his little wife to ride. Kenneth Kincaid had
business over at the new district of "Clarendon Park."

Drives, and livery-stable bills, were no part of the items allowed
for, in the programme of these young people's living; therefore
Rosamond put on her gray hat, with its soft little dove's breast,
and took her bright-striped shawl upon her arm, and let Kenneth lift
her into the buggy--for which there was no manner of need except
that they both liked it,--with very much the feeling as if she were
going off on a lovely bridal trip. They had had no bridal trip, you
see; they did not really want one; and this little impromptu drive
was such a treat!

Now the wonders of nature and the human mind show--if I must go so
far to find an argument for the statement I am making--that into a
single point of time or particle of matter may be gathered the
relations of a solar system or the experiences of a life; that a
universe may be compressed into an atom, or a molecule expanded into
a macrocosm; therefore I expect nobody to sneer at my Rosamond as
childishly nappy in her simple honeymoon, or at me for making
extravagant and unsupported assertions, when I say that this hour
and a half, and these four miles out to Clarendon Park and
back,--the lifting and the tucking in, and the setting off, the
sitting side by side in the ripe October air and the golden
twilight, the noting together every pretty turn, every flash of
autumn color in the woods, every change in the cloud-groupings
overhead, every glimpse of busy, bright-eyed squirrels up and down
the walls, every cozy, homely group of barnyard creatures at the
farmsteads, the change, the pleasure, the thought of home and
always-togetherness,--all this made the little treat of a country
ride as much to them, holding all that any wandering up and down the
whole world in their new companionship could hold,--as a going to
Europe, or a journey to mountains an