Below the hill a cornfield, now yellow with pumpkins, stretched to the farther road. Nearer the house was a kitchen garden, with an apple orchard beyond. A man in shirtsleeves was milking a cow behind a tiny barn.
"I bought this place three years ago for thirty-nine hundred dollars," said my stenographer. "They say it is worth nearer six thousand now. Anyhow it is worth a hundred thousand to me!"
A little girl, with bulging apron, appeared at the edge of the orchard and came running toward us.
"What have you got there?" called her father.
"Oh, daddy! Such lovely chestnuts!" cried the child. "And there are millions more of them!"
"We'll roast 'em after supper," said her father. "Toddle along now and wash up."
She put up a rosy, beaming face to be kissed and dashed away toward the house. I tried to remember what either of my two girls had been like at her age, but for some strange reason I could not.
Across the road the fertile countryside sloped away into a distant valley, hemmed in by dim blue hills, below which the sun had already sunk, leaving only a gilded edge behind. The air was filled with a soft, smoky haze. A church bell in the village struck six o'clock.
"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,"
I murmured.