n to the group of
Riverfield houses that huddled at the other end. All villages in the State
of Harpeth have been so built around the old "great houses" of the colonial
landowners, and between their generations has been developed a communistic
life that I somehow feel is to bridge from the pioneer life of this country
to the great new life of the greater commune that is coming to us. Down
there in Riverfield I knew that there was sin and sorrow and birth and
death, but there was no starvation, and for every tragedy there was a
neighbor to reach out a helping hand, and for every joy there were hearty
and friendly rejoicings.

"Oh, and I'm one of them--I belong," I said to myself as I noted each
cottage into which I went and came at will, as friend and beloved neighbor.
Even at that distance I could see a small figure, which I knew to be Luella
Spain, running up the long avenue, and in its hand I detected something
that, I was sure, was a covered plate or dish. "And I'm making Elmnest
fulfil its destiny into the future--into the future that the great Evan
Baldwin is preaching about in town, instead of practicing out in the
fields. I wonder if he really knows a single thing about farming."

"He does," came an answer from right at my shoulder in Pan's flutiest
voice, and I turned to find him standing just behind me on the very edge of
the old tilting rock.

"How do you know?" I demanded of him as I took the clean white cloth tied
up at four corners, gypsy-fashion, which he offered me and which, I could
see, was fairly bursting with green leaves of a kind I had never seen
before.

"I was with him at the Metropolitan the night I saw Ann Craddock in Gale
Beacon's box, you know,--the night that Mr. G. Bird sang 'Delilah,' and
also I've slept on the bare ground with him in his woods in Michigan and on
his red clay in Georgia."

"Well, I hate him all the same for the insult of his offer to buy Elmnest,
though I doubt if he has any family pride or any family either, so, of
course, he wouldn't understand that it _is_ an insult to offer to buy one's
colonial home with holes in the door to shoot Indians through," I answered
with the temper that always came at the mention of the name of a man I had
chosen to consider a foe without any consent on his part at all.

"You'd think he was born and raised in a hollow log if you should ever
interview him, and he hasn't any family, but from some of the motions he is
making, I think he in