Dinner was waiting, and presently the mother said that we would delay it no longer for the boys. We sat down at a table in a rough shed which opened from the sitting-room. A spotless cloth covered the board, and the service was simple and tasteful, and there was the uncommon luxury of napkins. The dinner moved with unembarrassed ease. We talked of the surrounding country, and its resemblance to other regions, and of the political situation. The mother led the talk, and tactfully guarded it from any approach to silence or to topics too intimate. Once, however, she touched lightly upon a former home in a prosperous corner of another State, and instantly I felt the hint of some family tragedy.
And now her two sons came shuffling in, rough and ruddy from their work, clean-cut, well-bred young fellows, far too young I thought to be "hauling logs," and I could read an agony of anxiety in their mother's face as she watched them wearily take their seat on the vacant bench by the table. They had been left in the care of the work in the absence of their father, who had gone some miles to a neighboring settlement, "on business," their mother added, blushing deeply, while the boys looked hard at their plates.
The afternoon's tramp lay through the wildest part of that wild region. From Shohola Falls to Kimble the direct road is one which leads straight across the mountain, and is almost unbroken, and seldom used. In all its course I passed but two or three farms; and these revealed a pitiful poverty, in the wretched hovels which did service as farm-houses and barns, and, more plainly, if possible, in the squalor of little children who gaped at me from among high weeds behind tottering fences.
On I went for miles, over a road so lonely that it recalled the loneliness of the sea, and, like the sea, the sweep of heaving mountains seemed unbroken in a boundless monotony. And then the landscape had in it the beauty and the majesty of the sea, and the whispering of the wind over vast fields of stunted pines and scrub oaks answered to the wash of waves, and bore a fragrance and freshness to match with ocean breezes.
Late in the afternoon my way descended abruptly by a more frequented road in the direction of Kimble. Presently I could see a railway and a canal, and I felt a little, I fancied, as an explorer must upon emerging, once more, into the region of the explored.
I wished to know the distance and the way to Tafton, and so I inquired of the first person whom I met. She was a milkmaid, and so picturesque a figure, that I felt a pleasurable excitement in the chance of a word with her. Her calico skirt was tucked up a little at one side. Under one bare arm she carried a milking-stool, and a bucket in the other hand. Her sun-bonnet had fallen from her head, and hung like a scholar's hood on her back. The sunlight was playing in glory about her face and in her abundant auburn hair.
My excitement suddenly took another form; for, as I lifted my hat in apologetic inquiry, there fell about me a shower of oak-leaves, which I had placed in the crown for the sake of added coolness.
The milkmaid had met me with a clear, frank look between the eyes; but she shrank a little now, and could not resist a startled glance, full of questioning, as to what further my hat might contain, and she answered me more with the purpose, I fancy, of being quickly rid of a wanderer of such doubtful mind, than of adding to his information.