tral point of interest. Seth Davis' blacksmith shop
comes next; Widow Clark's Emporium for the sale of candy, stationery and
cigars adjoins that; McNutt's office and dwelling combined is next, and
then Thorne's Livery and Feed Stables. You must understand they are not
set close together, but each has a little ground of its own. On the
other side of the street is the hardware store, with farm machinery
occupying the broad platform before it, and then the Millville House, a
two-storied "hotel" with a shed-like wing for the billiard-room and card
tables. Nib Corkins' drug store, jewelry store and music store combined
(with sewing machines for a "side line"), is the last of the "business
establishments," and the other three buildings are dwellings occupied by
Sam Cotting, Seth Davis and Nick Thorne.

Dick Pearson's farm house is scarcely a quarter of a mile up the
highway, but it isn't in Millville, for all that. There's a cross lane
just beyond Pearson's, leading east and west, and a mile to westward is
the Wegg Farm, in the wildest part of the foothills.

It is a poor farming country around Millville. Strangers often wonder
how the little shops of the town earn a living for their proprietors;
but it doesn't require a great deal to enable these simple folk to live.
The tourist seldom penetrates these inaccessible foothills; the roads
are too rough and primitive for automobiles; so Millville is shamefully
neglected, and civilization halted there some half a century ago.

However, there was a genuine sensation in store for this isolated
hamlet, and it was the more welcome because anything in the way of a
sensation had for many years avoided the neighborhood.

Marshall McMahon McNutt, or, as he was more familiarly called by those
few who respected him most highly, "Marsh" McNutt (and sundry other
appellations by those who respected him not at all), became the
recipient of a letter from New York announcing the intention of a
certain John Merrick, the new owner of the Wegg Farm, to spend the
summer on the place. McNutt was an undersized man of about forty, with a
beardless face, scraggly buff-colored hair, and eyes that were big,
light blue and remarkably protruding. The stare of those eyes was
impenetrable, because observers found it embarrassing to look at them.
"Mac's" friends had a trick of looking away when they spoke to him, but
children gazed fascinated at the expressionless blue eyeballs and
regarded their owner with