Still, this old woman enjoyed the fruit trees' budding promise as she patted along the railroad, and perhaps some old thrill shot again as a meadow-lark uttered his short, rich madrigal from the weather-darkened fence.
"Ho, Mis' Stillman," called Mallston's wife, standing in her door with the youngest on her arm, "le's go over and see that ther' picter car."
"I done done it," responded the old woman.
By the end of two weeks this photographic car had done good execution on the community. The artist himself appeared friendly, which greatly assisted his trade, openness to familiarity being a prime virtue in all rustic neighborhoods. Every youngster who came to the store after groceries, with a bag slung over the horse's neck in which to carry them, gave pap no peace until means were furnished for a rosy-cheeked tin-type of himself in a pink, green or purple case. The Appledore girls, handsome daughters of a rich farmer, and therefore able to sit for pictures in Kokomo, or even Indianapolis, yet put on all their chains, rings and bracelets and went to the car to test this young photographer's skill. Mrs. Stillman received money from her daughter in Ellwood, together with the written command: "You go and git your fortygraph took fer me, mother: we don't none of us never know what's a-garn to happen." So she removed her black alpaca from its peg on the wall for her adornment, and came also, explaining to the neighbors that Kit sent the money, so she did, and was makin' a pore mouth about not havin' no picter of mother. And having got the picture, she used all her past trials and present misfortunes to save half the price, which she succeeded in doing.
Every day the artist had a few sitters. It was surprising how many of the bilious, bare-legged children who collected to gaze at his framed specimens were brought to be photographed, for most of the villagers were squalidly poor and the farmers were entering their busy season. During this time he had opened the Harbison domicile to himself, being son of a friend who had sat in the State legislature with Mr. Harbison. All Fairfield knew that he went there nearly every day, and that it was not to shoot with the long-bow on the lawn. They had no idea how he loved to lounge from one empty room to another of this picturesque, half-furnished house, and how he was gratified by the fitness of the inhabitants to their abode. He liked to see Miss Gill tuck a bunch of peach-blossoms in her coil of hair, and to feel the quickening influences of spring supplemented by her electricity.
Mrs. Harbison took her earth-loving hands from garden-making and went to show the young people the ferns in the woods. She pulled her sun-bonnet over her eyes and trod out with the solid steps of a woman bred to love the soil under her feet. The photographer sketched along the way, but he finally sat down by Little Wildcat where the water boiled over boulders, and Mrs. Harbison went farther to dig ginseng. There was a joyful hurry of birds all around. That leopard of the Indiana woods, the sycamore, repeated itself in vistas.
"Sycamores always look like dazzling marble shafts blackened with patches of moss," said the young man.
"And their leaves," said the girl sitting on the log not far from him, "smell like poetry. I spread them on my face late in summer after a shower and suck up their breath. But I never can put the sensation into words."
"How's that for a sycamore?" he asked, showing a scrap.
She examined it with great satisfaction: "Why do you go about with a photographic car? Why don't you set out to be an artist?"