"

His prompt detection of the ailment, and prescription of a remedy which
in an hour showed its good effects, installed him in the landlord's best
graces. The latter said, "Well, it shall cost you nothing to-night,"
as he led the way to the supper-room. When Jacob went to bed he was
surprised on reflecting that he had not only been talking for a full
hour in the bar-room, but had been looking people in the face.

Resisting an offer of good wages if he would stay and help look after
the stables, he set forward the next morning with a new and most
delightful confidence in himself. The knowledge that now nobody knew him
as "Jake Flint" quite removed his tortured self-consciousness. When
he met a person who was glum and ungracious of speech, he saw,
nevertheless, that he was not its special object. He was sometimes asked
questions, to be sure, which a little embarrassed him, but he soon hit
upon answers which were sufficiently true without betraying his purpose.

Wandering sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left, he slowly
made his way into the land, until, on the afternoon of the fourth day
after leaving home, he found himself in a rougher region--a rocky, hilly
tract, with small and not very flourishing farms in the valleys. Here
the season appeared to be more backward than in the open country; the
hay harvest was not yet over.

Jacob's taste for scenery was not particularly cultivated, but something
in the loneliness and quiet of the farms reminded him of his own home;
and he looked at one house after another, deliberating with himself
whether it would not be a good place to spend the remainder of his month
of probation. He seemed to be very far from home--about forty miles, in
fact,--and was beginning to feel a little tired of wandering.

Finally the road climbed a low pass of the hills, and dropped into
a valley on the opposite side. There was but one house in view--a
two-story building of logs and plaster, with a garden and orchard on the
hillside in the rear. A large meadow stretched in front, and when the
whole of it lay clear before him, as the road issued from a wood, his
eye was caught by an unusual harvest picture.

Directly before him, a woman, whose face was concealed by a huge,
flapping sun-bonnet, was seated upon a mowing machine, guiding a span
of horses around the great tract of thick grass which was still uncut.
A little distance off, a boy and girl were raking the drier swaths
together, a