ay good-by to Crook, he started,
cried, "I will!" and added, "I'm coming with you, for a while!"

For two days Crook McKusick tramped with them, suiting his lean
activity, his sardonic impatience, to their leisurely slowness. He
called to the blackbirds, he found pasque-flowers for them, and in the
sun-baked hollows between hillocks coaxed them to lie and dream.

But one morning they found a note:

DEAR AUNTY AND UNCLE:

Heard a freight-train whistle and I'm off. But some day I'll
find you again. I'll cut out the booze, anyway, and maybe I'll
be a human being again. God bless you babes in the woods.

C. McK.

"The poor boy! God will bless him, too, and keep him, because he's
opened his heart again," whispered Mother. "Are we babes in the woods,
Seth? I'd rather be that than a queen, long as I can be with you."

East and west, north and south, the hoboes journeyed, and everywhere
they carried with them fables of Mr. and Mrs. Seth Appleby, the famous
wanderers, who at seventy, eighty, ninety, were exploring the world.
Benighted tramps in city lock-ups, talking to bored police reporters,
told the story, and it began to appear in little filler paragraphs here
and there in newspapers.

Finally a feature-writer on a Boston paper, a man with imagination and a
sense of the dramatic, made a one-column Sunday story out of the
adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Appleby. He represented them as wealthy
New-Yorkers who were at once explorers and exponents of the simple life.
He said nothing about a shoe-store, a tea-room, a hobo-camp.

The idea of these old people making themselves a new life caught many
imaginations. The Sunday story was reprinted and reprinted till the
source of it was entirely forgotten. The names of the Applebys became
stock references in many newspaper offices--Father even had a new joke
appended to his name, as though he were an actor or an author or
Chauncey Depew.

The Applebys were largely unconscious of their floating fame. But as
they tramped westward through West Virginia, as the flood tide of spring
and the vigor of summer bore them across Ohio and into Indiana, they
found that in nearly every town people knew their names and were glad to
welcome them as guests instead of making them work for food. When Father
did insist on cutting wood or spading a garden, it was viewed as a
charming eccentricity in him, a consistent following of the simple life,
and they were delighted when he w