own handwriting months after you have sent it off on a
long journey. Here was his own handwriting on a very soiled envelop,
plastered over with postmarks. How quaint was the superscription, how
eloquent the distant dates of the postmarks! "For Natalie. At the Ranch
of Dom Francisco, on the Road to Oeiras, in the Province of Ceara,
Brazil."

The envelop had been cut open. Lewis took out the many sheets and
searched them for a sign. None was there. He looked again at the
envelop. Across it was stamped a notice of non-delivery on account of
deficient address. Then his eyes fell on faint writing in pencil under a
postmark. He recognized the halting handwriting of Dom Francisco's
eldest girl. "She is gone," she had written. Nothing more.

"Gone?" questioned Lewis. "Gone where? Where could Natalie go?" He read
parts of his letter over, and blushed at his enthusiasms of almost a
year ago. Almost a year! Leighton called him. He tore up the letter and
threw it away. It was time to start. Then had come the good-by to
Cellette, and after that the wonders of the road had held his mind in a
constantly renewing grip. They still held it.

Leighton was beyond being a guide. He was a companion. When he could, he
avoided big cities and monuments. He loved to stop for the night at
wayside inns where the accommodations were meager, but ample opportunity
was given for a friendly chat with the hostess cook. And if the inn was
one of those homely evening meeting-places for old folks, he would say:

"Lew, no country wears its heart on its sleeve, but 'way inside. Let us
live here a little while and feel the pulse of France."

When they crossed the border, he sat down under the first shade tree and
made Lewis sit facing him.

"This," he said gravely, "is an eventful moment. You have just entered a
strange country where cooks have been known to fry a steak and live.
There are people that eat the steaks and live. It is a wonderful
country. Their cooks are also generally ignorant of the axiomatic
mission of a dripping-pan, as soggy fowls will prove to you. But what we
lose in pleasing alimentation, we make up in scenery and food for
thought. Collectively, this is the greatest people on earth;
individually, the smallest. Their national life is the most communal,
the best regulated, the nearest socialistic of any in the world,
and--they live it by the inch."

One afternoon, after a long climb through an odorous forest of
red-stemmed pines, w