Emily's glowing eyes, fixed on my face, grew very wide and grave. I could only press her hand in parting for Grandpa, growing impatient, had succeeded in clucking Fanny on again.

We drove along the river road, and, passing through the Indian encampment, there were more good-byes exchanged by the roadside.

Then climbing up "Sandy Slope," beyond the settlement, we heard the shrill "Hullo!" of a familiar voice, and looking back, saw Bachelor Lot running after us very swiftly, his head destitute of covering, and his little wizened face glowing red as the celestial Mars in the distance. He looked like some odd, fantastic toy that had been wound up and set going.

So he came up with us, and trying to conceal his breathlessness in polite little "hums and haws," delivered aside, he offered me a huge bouquet, composed, I should think, of every sort of wild-flower available on the Cape at that season, and showing, in its arrangement, marks of the most arduous striving after artistic effect. In the other hand, he held out to me a basket of large, selected boxberries.

I accepted the gifts with unaffected delight, and thanked Bachelor Lot warmly. I looked back at him, trudging cheerfully homeward through the sand, so withered and small, with the gray in his hair, and his coat so much too long for him—back to the poor brown house, which no tender love had ever hallowed, or merry waiting laugh made bright for him; and I wondered, along his life's way which looked so sad and desolate, what hidden wild flowers God had strewed for him, that he seemed always so humbly cheerful and content, and brought his best of offerings with a smile to bless the happier lot of others.

For the rest of the way, the wild untenanted stretch was unbroken by any incident; yet I remember no tedium by the way; and I believe that a trip taken with Grandma and Grandpa Keeler through the most trackless desert would inevitably have been made to teem with diversion. Those blessed souls! I smile, looking back, but through tears, and with a reverence and tenderness far deeper than the smile.

By the time we reached the West Wallen depot the sky had clouded over.

"A little shower comin' up," Grandma said, but Grandpa shook his head and prophesied "a long, stiddy spell o' weather."

I persuaded my friends not to wait with me for the arrival of the train which, owing to some discrepancy in the matter of time between Wallencamp and West Wallen, would not be due for an hour or more.

I watched them out of sight, the last of my Wallencamp! How deeply, how utterly it had grown into my life, so that now, in spite of the secret, glad exultation I felt at the thought of going home, my heart went running out after that quaint, receding vehicle, and aching sensibly.