At the little junction in Vermont they
found a farmer with a wagon full of meal-bags. They asked him if he could not take them up to the old Keys farm and bring them back in time for the return train, due in two hours.
They had planned to call it a sketching trip, so they said, "We have been there before, we are artists, and we might find some views worth taking, and we want also to make a short call upon the Misses Keys."
"Did ye calculate to paint the old house in the picture?"
They said it was possible they might do so. They wanted to see it, anyway.
"Waal, I guess you are too late. The house burnt down last night, and everything in it."
The Bringing of the Rose
BY HARRIET LEWIS BRADLEY
For certain subjects one of the most valuable works of reference in all Berlin was Miss Olivia Valentine's "Adress-buch," the contents of which were self-collected, self-tested, and abounded in extensive information concerning hotels and pensions, apartments and restaurants, families offering German home life with the language, instructors, and courses of lectures, doctors, dentists, dressmakers, milliners, the most direct way to Mendelssohn's grave in the Alte Dreifaltigkeits-Kirchhof, how to find lodgings in Baireuth during the Wagner festival, where to stay in Oberammergau, if it happened to be the year of the Passion Play, and so on, indefinitely.