he book!"

It was a volume of Herodotus in the original Greek!

CHAPTER XXIII

LETTERS

Buckwheat was cut, harvest brooded hazily over the land and the fields
were bright with goldenrod when Diane turned sharply across Virginia to
Kentucky.

"It is already autumn," she wrote to Ann Sherrill. "The summer has
flown by like a bright-winged bird. For days now the forests have been
splashed with red and gold. The orchards are heavy with harvest
apples, the tassels of the corn are dark and rusty, and the dooryards
of the country houses riot gorgeously in scarlet sage and marigold,
asters and gladiolas. The twilight falls more swiftly now and the
nights are cooler but before the frost sweeps across the land I shall
be in Georgia.

"For all it is autumn elsewhere, here in this wonderful blue grass
land, it is spring again, a second spring. The autumn sunlight over
the woods and pastures is deeply, richly yellow. There are meadow
larks and off somewhere the tinkle of a cow bell. Oh, Ann, how good it
is to be alive!

"Ages ago, in that remote and barbarous past when I lived with a roof
above my head, there were times when every pulse of my body cried and
begged for life--for gypsy life and gypsy wind and the song of the
roaring river! Now, somehow, I feel that I have lived indeed--so fully
that a wonderful flood tide of peace and happiness flows strongly in my
veins. I am brown and happy. Each day I cook and tramp and fish and
swim and sleep--how I sleep with the leaves rustling a lullaby of
infinite peace above me! Would you believe that I lived for two days
and nights in a mountain cave? I did indeed, but Johnny was greatly
troubled. Aunt Agatha stuffed his head with commands.

"The South thrills and calls. After all, though I was born in the
Adirondacks, I am Southern, every inch of me. The Westfalls have been
Florida folk since the beginning of time.

"There is an interesting nomad in a picturesque suit of corduroy who
crosses my path from time to time with an eccentric music-machine.
Sometimes I see him gravely organ-grinding for a crowd of youngsters,
sometimes--with an innate courtliness characteristic of him--for a
white-haired couple by a garden gate. He is wandering about in search
of health. Oddly, his way lies, too, through Kentucky and Tennessee,
to Florida. He--and Ann, dear, this confidence of his I must beg you
to respect, as I know you will--is a Hungarian nobleman, picturesque