e flag to take possession of new territory, they hung out
their sign, stepped back to admire it as it swung and shone against the
crimson ramblers, and watched for the next motor-car.

It was coming! It was a seven-passenger car, filled with women in
blanket coats. One of them actually waved, as the car approached the
little couple who were standing in the sun, unconsciously arm in arm.
Then the car had streaked by, was gone round the bend.

The second car passed them, and the third. A long intense period when
the road was vacant. Then the fourth and fifth cars, almost together;
and the file of motorists turned from exciting prospects into just
motorists, passing strangers, oblivious of the two old people under
their hopeful sign.

While they were forlornly re-entering the house the eleventh car
suddenly stopped, and five hungry people trooped into the tea-room with
demands for tea and muffins and cake. The Applebys didn't have muffins,
but they did have sandwiches, and everybody was happy. Mother shooed
the maid out into the kitchen, and herself, with awkward eagerness to
get orders exactly right, leaned over the tea-table. In the kitchen
Father stuffed kindling into the stove to bring the water to a boil
again, and pantingly seized the bread-knife and attacked a loaf as
though he were going to do it a violence. Mother entered, took the knife
away from him, and dramatically drove him out to cut up more kindling.

The customers were served. While they ate and drank, and talked about
what they had eaten and drunk at lunch at an inn, they were unconscious
of two old pairs of eyes that watched them from the kitchen door, as
brightly, as furtively, as excitedly as two birds in a secret thicket.
The host paid without remarks what seemed to the Applebys an enormous
bill, a dollar and sixty cents, and rambled out to the car, still
unknowing that two happy people wanted to follow him with their
blessings. This history is unable to give any further data regarding
him; when his car went round the bend he disappeared from the fortunes
of the Applebys, and he was not to know how much blessing he had
scattered. I say, perhaps he was you who read this--you didn't by any
chance happen to be motoring between Yarmouth and Truro, May 16, 1915,
did you? With five in the party; coffee-colored car with one mud-guard
slightly twisted?

The season was not quick in opening. To the Applebys the time between
mid-May and mid-June was crawlin