amp, and equal to Barnum's Three Rings
and Mammoth Hippodrome. Doesn't that sound just like Joe? I'm sure we
can manage to see something of it. Mr. Shelby's meeting won't begin
till eight-thirty and Eden Centre can't be ten minutes' drive from the
grove."

She sowed without conception of the harvest. The pleasuring so idly
planned, the religionists whose vagaries provoked her laughter, were in
time to bulk huge in a clairvoyant light of revelation.

It fell a ripe autumn day with the haze mantling the orchards like the
purple of a plum, a day in whose magic atmosphere even common things
wore an air of poetry. The very canal was transfigured.

"There is a bit of Holland," said Ruth, as they crossed the waterway on
the ragged hem of the town. "If this were Europe and the courthouse
over there could triple its age and take another name, this bridge
would swarm with the 'personally conducted' admiring the view. I don't
wonder that artists are beginning to paint the canal."

"They say a house-boat party came through last week," Mrs. Hilliard
remarked.

"Tied their scow near my place," put in her husband. "Had the hold all
rigged up with a piano and curtains and rugs. Harum-scarum looking lot
of men and women you wouldn't trust to paint a barn. They overran the
quarries and made pictures of the Polacks."

"Bernard Graves met them," Ruth added. "They told him that Little
Poland was a second Barbizon for peasant models, with an 'Angelus' or a
'Man with the Hoe' around every corner."

Joe Hilliard guffawed.

"Guess they meant the woman with the hoe; she's the agriculturalist in
the Polack matrimonial team."

Shelby was discreetly backward in these quicksands which the quarry
owner did not fear to tread, but the canal stirred his imagination,
too, and in a characteristic way.

"It takes seven figures to express last year's tonnage down the Ditch
to tidewater," he told them; "stone, lumber, food. Why it dumped over
three-quarters of a million tons of food alone into New York City's
maw. Yet they say it's antiquated and can't compete with the
railroads. What else has kept the railroads within bounds? Ask any
Tuscarora shipper what happens yearly when navigation closes. Abandon
it! We'll see. The canal counties swing a pretty vote in this state."

Hilliard laughed.

"Think you're addressing the Legislature, Ross?"

"I heard you address the Assembly once," Ruth said. "I was a Vassar
girl then, visi