door put down a pink horseshoe and came
out. I'm much obliged for blacksmiths nowadays, aren't you, Michael
Daragh? I love their leaping fires and their worn, leather aprons and
their dim, rich Flemish interiors,--in our soft world of push
buttons.

This one said, "Was they a string around his neck, Dan'l?" Then he
went back into his shop and returned with a long stick with a bent
nail in the end and began to fish absorbedly into the culvert.
Presently a wild crescendo of shrieks announced his catch. I shut my
eyes and covered my ears and when I looked again he was hauling out a
quivering lump of baby dog. He felt him all over with grimy, gentle
fingers and "allowed they warn't nothin' broke ... just skairt him
outer a year's growth," handed him back to the boy and went again to
his horseshoe. The people pressed close with little clucks of
sympathy and made the nicest fuss about it, and the boy turned out to
be Daniel Gillespie and I went right on home with him and arranged to
move there to-morrow--his mother desiring a day in which to "red up"
for me. I wanted to go at once--I'm so afraid this hotel might close
with a snap, with me on the inside. At noon to-day I did not crave
any of the ready-to-wear effects on the zebra menu card and asked the
aloof young lady under the pompadour how long the chops would take.
"'Bout fifteen minutes." "Very well, then," I said, "I'll take the
chops." "_Ain't_ any."

Don't you adore that, Michael Daragh?

_The Next Friday,
At Deacon Gillespie's._

The top of the morning to you, Michael Daragh! Here in the rich cream
of the day we're waiting for the mail, Dan'l and I and the pup. Guess
where? In the graveyard, and I'm sitting on a tumbled-over tombstone.
I wish I could make you see this spot. I've always hated cemeteries,
the sleek, prosperous, well-fed, well-groomed sort, but this is
indeed God's Acre. You step over the broken stones of the wall into a
land of gracious gray; gray stone and moss, gray sky and feathery
fog. Twice only in my vista a note of color--a low-growing lobelia,
intensely blue against the foot of a new grave, and further on a
brave geranium, flaunting the scarlet flag of defiance at death; for
the rest, the quiet gray of peace and permanence. Involuntarily, one
treads softly, as in a room with sleepers ... sleep