fitting beef for the royal table, and
a king of France slighted the business of an empire for the acquirement
of this art, and a king of England knighted a roast; but they all died
and were buried without tasting beef as it ought to go into a man's
mouth. I write it first. A Polled-Angus heifer, fed and watered and
cared for like a child, should be killed suddenly without fright, and
butchered properly; let the choice pieces hang from a rafter by green
withes and be smoked with hickory logs until the fibres begin to dry in
them, then cut down and broil.

I arose and went out of doors to wash the night off. Between the house
and the log stable, under a giant sugar tree a spring of water bubbled
out through the limestone stratum, ran laughing down a long sapling
spout, and splashed into a huge old moss-covered trough.

With such food and such water, and the air of the Hills, is it any
wonder that Simon Betts was a man at eighty? Hark ye! my masters of the
great burgs, drinking poison in your smoky holes.

I plunged my head into the water, and my arms up to the elbows, then
came out dripping and wiped it off on a homespun linen towel which the
old man had given me when I left the house. As I stood rubbing my arms
on the good linen, Ump and Jud came down from the stable and stopped to
dip a drink in the long gourd that hung by the spring. They were about
to pass on, when Ump suddenly stopped and pointed out a man's footprints
leading from the stable path over the wet sod to the road. There were
only one or two of these prints in the damp places below the spring, but
they were fresh, and made by a foot smaller far than the wide one of old
Simon Betts.

We followed Ump to the road. A horse had been hitched to the "rider" of
the rail fence, and there were his tracks stamped in the hard clay.
There was not light enough to see very clearly, so we struck matches and
got down on the bank to study the details of the tracks. I saw that the
horse had been one of medium size,--a saddle horse, shod with a "store"
shoe, remodelled by some smith. But this knowledge gave no especial
light.

Ump and Jud lay on their bellies with their noses to the earth searching
the shoe marks. "It's no use," I said, "we can't tell." And I sat up.
The two neither answered nor paid the slightest attention. No
bacteriologist plodding in his eccentric orbit ever studied the outlines
of a new-found germ with deeper or more painstaking care. Presently the