centre anywhere, they came to a little hall with automobiles parked around it, but no light in the window. Billy went to investigate and came back a bit dumbfounded.
“They’re having moving-pictures,” he reported. “Strictly high-class stuff. ‘Lorna Doone’ is the attraction to-night, and next week it’s to be ‘The Merchant of Venice’—a joint scheme of your ubiquitous Women’s Institute and a farmer’s club. If we would go a little farther back from town we might possibly drop in on a radiophone concert somewhere along the way. For your research observations, I would inform you that one object of the picture scheme here is to run a counter-attraction against the influence of a very depraved movie theatre in the next town. I imagine they’re getting somewhere, too. When I was coming out, a boy of about sixteen or so asked me if I knew where he could get the book ‘Lorna Doone.’ I wonder if he’ll want to start in on Shakespeare after next week.”
And with the old, recurring pain, he remembered how avidly another sixteen-year-old boy had devoured a collection of paper-backed novels left at the Swamp Farm by an itinerant hired man.
CHAPTER XVIII.
“I stand where the cooling breeze from the hills
Meets the draught from the furnace heat,
And lonely eyes from the cabins far
Trace the lights of the city street.“I hear the throb and the laugh of life,
While violets bloom at my feet,
For, oh, there is much to gain and to give
Where the town and the country meet.”
It was on a journey in another direction, one cool spring evening at sundown, that they met another surprise. Rounding a curve in a level, wooded road they met a party of some dozen boys dressed in the briefest of gym. suits and running shoes, trotting along with the easy poise of practised runners. They might have been a group of college athletes out training for their annual meet, but one would scarcely expect to find them twenty miles out from town. Meeting a native of the locality jogging along with a heavy farm horse and sulky, Billy stopped to ask if he knew where the boys came from.
“Oh, I know where they come from, all right”, was the grim response. “I know where they’re goin’, too, if this sort of thing keeps up. They’re boys raised within three miles of here, every one of them, though we never aimed to start a circus of our own till Sam Brown’s boy come home from college. Old enough to know better, too.”
“What did he do?”
“What did he do! Got it into his head that he was Longboat, apparently, and every night about dusk he’d come out half stripped, and he’d run around the block. He got away with it all right, too, till one night I was drivin’ through Dead Man’s Swamp and all at once this long, white shape of a man come lopin’ along. The horse gave one snort and bolted, and was all but away when he caught the bridle, ‘whoah’-in’ and ‘steady’-in’, and speakin’ as natural as if he was after the plough instead of leapin’ over the roads at night like a tame kangaroo. But I gave him a piece of my mind that I guess he won’t forget. I gave him fair warning that if I ever caught him at such pranks again, I’d see him in the asylum where he belonged. He acted ashamed enough about it at the time, but they say he still goes out just the same. I haven’t been down that way at night since. Worse still, he’s got all the younger fellows at it now, and the whole neighborhood’s got so callous to it that even the horses don’t shy at them no more.”
They called and asked the Representative about it on their way home.