land, so mellowed, so harmonious, so significant,
seemed hardly real. It was a vision.

We rounded out our day by getting lodgings in the quaint old Wright's
tavern which stood (and still stands) at the forks of the road, a
building whose date painted on its chimney showed that it was nearly two
hundred years old! I have since walked Carnarvan's famous walls, and sat
in the circus at Nismes--but I have never had a deeper thrill of
historic emotion than when I studied the beamed ceiling of that little
dining room. Our pure joy in its age amused our landlord greatly.

Being down to our last dollar, we struck out into the country next
morning, for the purpose of finding work upon a farm but met with very
little encouragement. Most of the fields were harvested and those that
were not were well supplied with "hands." Once we entered a beautiful
country place where the proprietor himself (a man of leisure, a type we
had never before seen) interrogated us with quizzical humor, and at last
sent us to his foreman with honest desire to make use of us. But the
foreman had nothing to give, and so we went on.

All day we loitered along beautiful wood roads, passing wonderful old
homesteads gray and mossy, sheltered by trees that were almost human in
the clasp of their protecting arms. We paused beside bright streams, and
drank at mossy wells operated by rude and ancient sweeps, contrivances
which we had seen only in pictures. It was all beautiful, but we got no
work. The next day, having spent our last cent in railway tickets, we
rode to Ayer Junction, where we left our trunks in care of the baggage
man and resumed our tramping.

CHAPTER XXIII

Coasting Down Mt. Washington

In spite of all our anxiety, we enjoyed this search for work. The
farmers were all so comically inquisitive. A few of them took us for
what we were, students out on a vacation. Others though kind enough,
seemed lacking in hospitality, from the western point of view, and some
were openly suspicious--but the roads, the roads! In the west
thoroughfares ran on section lines and were defined by wire fences. Here
they curved like Indian trails following bright streams, and the stone
walls which bordered them were festooned with vines as in a garden.

That night we lodged in the home of an old farmer, an octogenarian who
had never in all his life been twenty miles from his farm. He had never
seen Boston, or Portland, but he had been twice to Nashua, retu