The canopy over our heads made a grateful shade, and I looked all about me. Back of the station on the railway track, were some big buildings that I heard the farmer tell Mr. Denville were a creamery, a canning factory, and a warehouse for apple barrels. As we turned up from the station to drive along a wide road, we passed a number of stores and houses. They made the station village of Black River. It was not very pretty just there. We had not yet come to the pretty part.
Mrs. Denville was looking about her very quietly, but very attentively as we passed beyond the stores and the houses, then entered on a long, country road.
“See there,” she said to Mary, “look at those birds building nests in that bank of earth!”
As she spoke, Mr. Denville leaned over the back of the front seat. “I am very glad to have you here, Maud,” he said in a deeply gratified voice. “I have often longed to revisit the haunts of my childhood with you.”
“Why did you not tell me?” she said in a low voice. “I would have come long before!”
“Over there,” he said with a sweep of his hand toward a grove of pines that we were passing, “rye grew when I was a boy. Just think of that.”
Mrs. Denville looked at the sturdy trees, then at her husband. “And you are not so very old,” she said.
“And yonder,” he said with another gesture toward the fields and woods on the other side of the road, “I have hunted foxes and wildcats many a day.”
“Oh, papa, are there any foxes here now?” asked Mary.
“Not about here,” replied her father. “The land has been cleared so rapidly that they have retreated to other fastnesses.”