to come closer and closer to the foot of the hill. Not being
able to find a direct path, Oliver finally drew up beside the low
stone wall and plunged, on foot, through the high grass of the
orchard.

"Wait until I see if they are here," he instructed Janet, "and then I
will come back for you."

His new acquaintances were sitting on the bench beside the doorway as
he came up the hill, Polly in a very trim blue dress and without her
apron, but the Beeman in his same dilapidated overalls. The girl had a
notebook on her knee and was putting down records at her father's
dictation.

"Here is our friend in need, of yesterday," said the Beeman cordially
as Oliver came up the path, "but we can't put him to work to-day
because we are just about to set off to fetch some new beehives. There
are more colonies than I thought that need dividing, and I find I am
out of hives."

"Let me get them for you," Oliver offered at once, and explained the
presence of his sister in the car below.

"Polly can go with you to show you the way," the Beeman agreed
willingly. "John Massey, who makes our hives for us, lives a good many
miles away, at the upper end of Medford Valley. I shall be glad to
save the time of going myself. Come to the top of the hill, so that I
can point out the direction of the road to you."

They took the little path beyond the house, leading upward to the very
summit of the hill. In the direction from which Oliver had come, up
the gentler incline of the southern slope, the view was narrowed by
the woods and the orchard, showing only the long vista that led away
toward the high ridge opposite and the blue dip of shining sea. On
the eastern face of the hill, however, the ground fell away steeply to
a sweep of river and a broad stretch of green farming country. It lays
below like a vast sunken garden, with great square fields for lawns
and clumps of full-leaved, rounded trees for shrubbery. The
yellow-green of wheat and the blue-green of oats stretched out, a
smooth expanse that rippled and crinkled as the wind and the sweeping
shadow of a cloud went slowly down the valley. There were no country
houses of high-walled, steep-roofed magnificence here, only
comfortable farm dwellings with wide eaves and generous barns, a few
with picturesque, pointed silos and slim, high-towering windmills.

"Most of that farming land belongs to your Cousin Jasper," the Beeman
said, while Oliver, too intent upon staring at the view below