their sides, or else low brick farm-houses set in a field of corn and
potatoes, with a dripping pump-trough at the door. It is a thorough
country-road, lazy, choking itself up with mud even in summer, to keep
city-carriages out, bordering itself with slow-growing maples and banks
of lush maiden's-hair, blood-red partridge-berries, and thistles. You
can find dandelions growing in the very middle of it, there is so little
travel out there.

One August morning, in one of its quietest curves among the hills, there
was a fat old horse, standing on it, sniffing up the cool air: pure air,
it is there, so cool and rare that you can detect even the faint scent
of the wild-grape blossoms or the buttercups in it in spring. The wagon
to which the horse was fastened had no business there in the cedar-hills
or slow-going road; it belonged to town, every inch, from hub to
cover,--was square-built, shiningly clean, clear-lettered as
Philadelphia itself.

"That completes the practical whole," said Andy Fawcett, polishing a tin
measure, and putting it on the front seat of the wagon, and then
surveying the final effect.

Andy was part-owner of it: the yellow letters on the sides were, "_A.
Fawcett & Co. Milk_." It was very early,--gray, soggy clouds keeping
back the dawn,--but light enough for Andy to see that his shoes, which
he had blacked late last night, were bright, and his waistcoat, etc.,
"all taut."

"I like the sailor lingo," he said, curling his moustache, and turning
over his pink shirt-collar. "They've a loose dash about 'em. It must go
far with the girls."

Then he looked at the wagon again, and at a pinchbeck watch he carried.

"Five. No matter how neat an' easy a fellow's dress is, it's wasted this
time in the mornin'. Them street-car conductors hev a chance for it all
day, dang 'em!"

He went back to the house as softly as possible, and brought out a
lantern, which was silver-mounted and of cut glass. He hung it carefully
in the wagon.

"There's no knowin' what use I may have for it,"--shaking his head, and
rubbing it tenderly.

Andy had owned that lantern for several years, and carried it with him
always. "You cannot know, Jane," he used to say to the woman whom he
worked for, "what a comfort I find in it. It"--He always stopped there,
and she never replied, but immediately talked of something else. Their
customers (for they kept half a dozen cows on the place, and Andy took
the milk into town)--their customer