3
What I like best’s the long unbroken line of the hills there. Yes, it’s a good view. Come, let’s visit the orchard. Here’s peaches twenty years on the branch. Not ripe yet!? Why—! Those hills! Those hills! But you’ld be young again! Well, fourteen’s a hard year for boy or girl, let alone one older driving the pricks in, but though there’s more in a song than the notes of it and a smile’s a pretty baby when you’ve none other—let’s not turn backward. Mumble the words, you understand, call them four brothers, strain to catch the sense but have to admit it’s in a language they’ve not taught you, a flaw somewhere,—and for answer: well, that long unbroken line of the hills there.
Two people, an old man and a woman in early middle life, are talking together upon a small farm at which the woman has just arrived on a visit. They have walked to an orchard on the slope of a hill from which a distant range of mountains can be clearly made out. A third man, piecing together certain knowledge he has of the woman with what is being said before him is prompted to give rein to his imagination. This he does and hears many oblique sentences which escape the others.
Coda.
Squalor and filth with a sweet cur nestling in the grimy blankets of your bed and on better roads striplings dreaming of wealth and happiness. Country life in America! The cackling grackle that dartled at the hill’s bottom have joined their flock and swing with the rest over a broken roof toward Dixie.