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THE GOLDEN ROAD

There is night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath.

—George Borrow.

"Good-night, dear Jean François," said she with gaiety.

"May your dreams be of your beloved roads of Picardy." She threw him an elfish kiss from her finger-tips and hastened into her airy improvised bedroom.

THE GOLDEN ROAD

BY

FRANK WALLER ALLEN

AUTHOR OF "BACK TO ARCADY"

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND DECORATIONS

BY

GEORGE HOOD

NEW YORK
WESSELS & BISSELL CO.
1910
Copyright, 1910, by
Wessels & Bissell Co.
October
ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL
All rights reserved
PREMIER PRESS
NEW YORK

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I The Happy Pedler Comes to Town [3]
II The Jade and the Inquisition [13]
III Jean François' Vast Possessions [23]
IV The Misadventure of a Circus [35]
V Timid Conquest Comes to Town [48]
VI The Jade, a Nonentity, becomes the Illustrious Nance [57]
VII A Pedler's Pack of Dreams [68]
VIII Monsieur l'Abbé Picot of the Brave, Outlandish Heart [74]
IX The Child is Father to the Man [86]
X On the Morning Road [97]
XI The Satisfactory Explanation of Nance [107]
XII A Hebe of the Highway [117]
XIII The Night in the Greenwood [129]
XIV Vicarious Vagabonds [136]
XV "If I were Monsieur l'Abbé Picot" [146]
XVI Hebe's Farewell to Pan [155]
XVII The Day of Faith [163]
XVIII The Day of Doubt [171]
XIX The Day of Lost Confidence [176]
XX Monsieur l'Abbé at Home [185]
XXI "Little St. Jacques of the Street" [194]
XXII Monsieur l'Abbé Lies Ill [201]
XXIII "I would talk with some old lover's ghost, who lived before the god of love was born" [210]
XXIV The Priest and Faun [216]
XXV Monsieur l'Abbé Picot Goes upon a Journey [222]

ILLUSTRATIONS

She threw him an elfish kiss from her finger-tips and hastened into her
airy improvised bedroom. (Page 135.) [Frontispiece]

The Boy ceased his sobbing. After a while, looking up with a tearful,
smiling face, he announced, as if to the Voice that had called him: "Now I must go to work." Facing page [92]

A solitary man, standing on the hilltop, turned slowly from mountain to
valley, from sky to field, seeming to eat and think and breathe—to make
a part of him by some paganish transubstantiation—the very day itself. Facing page [98]

PART FIRST

"'T was Pan himself had wandered here,
A-strolling through the sordid city,
And piping to the civic ear
The prelude of some pastoral ditty!
The demigod had crossed the seas—
From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr,
And Syracusan times—to these
Far shores...."

—Edmund Clarence Stedman.

THE GOLDEN ROAD

CHAPTER ONE

THE HAPPY PEDLER COMES TO TOWN

At the close of a glad day in early June, Nance and I stood watching a horse and van, driven by a stranger of captivating appearance, turn from the down-river turnpike and halt on a grassy knoll overlooking the Ohio. The cart, which was a large two-wheeled affair with little cupboard-like boxes beneath, and a short pair of stairs for mounting stored on the top among a medley of old umbrellas, bore an adventurous, foreign aspect. At least we had seen nothing before so wonderful. Its wheels were low and broad-tired; the shafts were thick and heavy with a prop suspended from each of them, that the weight might be balanced when not supported by the ragged brown mare now pulling it. The body, held rather high above the axle by a pair of big, bowed springs, was completely closed upon all sides like a circus wagon, though, more than anything else, this queer craft seemed a sort of private Noah's ark. The entrance was in the rear and, as we afterward discovered, could be reached by mounting a wheel, hauling the steps from the roof, and attaching them to small sockets in the door-sill. This amazing and spectacular vehicle was painted a brilliant yellow.

The man idling beside this magnificent equipage was the most picturesque being I have ever seen. He was of medium height with broad, muscular shoulders, sturdy legs like one used to walking much in the open, and a general ease and grace of movement, as if each motion were made to music, indicating a perfect health of body. His features were large and generous with penetrating quizzical gray eyes, a nose slightly Roman, and a wide mouth which seemed continuously to be struggling to suppress a smile. He wore a short bushy beard that needed brushing. His hair was red, heavy, unkempt, and a trifle long, completely covering his ears. On his feet were stout, heavy-soled, laced boots. Thrust into their tops were well-worn corduroy trousers. His shirt was of dark blue woolen material, open at the neck, showing a corded, hairy chest. He wore no hat.

Upon arriving at the knoll the master of the van sat hastily upon the ground and, as if gravel had been eating into his heels, quickly removed his boots. Then he rubbed his feet slowly and sensuously over the soft cool grass as if it were a specific for drawing fever from blistered soles. Next, quite as suddenly, he arose and went about the business of unhitching the mare from the cart. Just as he was leading her from her burden we, like curious children, drew near and mumbled a bashful good evening.

"How do you do, my dears," he said, with frank good humor.

"My name," I ventured, "is Charles Reubelt King, and hers is Nance Gwyn.... This is our common," I added, with the condescending air of the small proprietor whose vanity was touched because of not having been consulted concerning its occupancy by the daring incumbent.

"Happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Charles Screwbelt Ring. Miss Nance Gwyn, I am distinctly honored.... And I," said he, with an elaborate bow in which he removed and swept the ground with an imaginary hat, while one hand pressed his heart, "am Jean François, sometimes known as the Umbrella Man, at others as the Happy Pedler.... I am pedler, poet, mender of umbrellas." Here he straightened to his full height, all the time yelling directly at me, "Umbrellas to mend! Umbrellas to mend! No?" he exclaimed with a comical shrug of his shoulders, and then continued, "I am philosopher, vagabond, musician,—a very sad gentleman you see, who am fifth cousin to Master William Shakespeare, and own brother to François Villon, one-time king of the French!" Then, again turning and addressing himself particularly to me, "I own the road, the river, the hills, the trees, and all the blue summer sky. The stars are mine, too, and I turn 'em out to pasture o' nights."

"O, I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle," he cried to Nance, as if he had forgotten something pertaining to good breeding.

"This lady," here he turned, including in his bow the patient little brown mare waiting at his elbow for the bridle to be removed, "is my mare Rogue. She's not a pretty lass, and she lacks a sense of humor. There are none like her for a pleasant ramble down the road. She loves her sugar like a child.... Shake hands with Miss Gwyn, my dove," he added, while Nance timidly touched the extended hoof.

"Also," continuing the presentations, "Mademoiselle Columbine," and he waved a hand whimsically toward the yellow van. "She is beautiful, now, isn't she, my dears? And she's sound, serviceable, and optimistic. She holds my dreams.... What more could you ask? Yes?"

"And last of all," said he, removing with a flourish a little, burned, villainous briar-root pipe from his mouth, "this is Pierrett. She's a dirty wench, but sweet and toothsome as parched corn. She is as philosophical as a fisherman, as independent as a church pillar, and she's my soul mate! Eh, Pierrett?"

"You see," he said, addressing me to the exclusion of Nance, as he turned Rogue onto the pasture, "I'm the lone male among all of these females. A sort of Mormon elder, I am; but, tut, man, it's only a brotherly kind of relationship which doesn't entail jealousy.... You see, son, everybody's children are mine—yes, you two's my kiddies—and I pretty much own the world; only, you see, I don't take it and use it except for traveling purposes. All I ask," said he, becoming quite serious, with a far-away expression in his splendid eyes while he pointed down the long white highway, "is a road to roam,—le long du trimard—a river now and then for variety, the sigh of my music in the greenwood, a bit of milk and cheese on a village common at night, for I love the homely gleam of distant lights, and the stars to sing me to sleep while browsing Rogue twinkles her grass.... Um, ah, doesn't make you sleepy, son, just to hear about it? Yes?"

"Now, Mr. Charles—"

"Reubelt King," I hastened to correct him, as he hesitated with a merry twinkle in his eye.

"—Reubelt King, run along and tell me whose house that is way down yonder on the river."

"The old home of the many pillars?" I questioned. "Monsieur l'abbé Jacques Picot."

"Father Picot?... The hell—O, I beg your pardon, Rogue, Pierrett, Columbine, and your young ladyship!... You females are terribly ubiquitous at times.... No, that's not a cuss-word, Mademoiselle. It means you women are always lingering around a good, healthy, pleasant, cussful male like me.

"Where'd I come from? Just down the chemin, my dears. And if you were impolite enough to ask me where I was going, that's where—down the road.... Where do I live?"

Jean François sings:

"Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall you see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.

"Who doth ambition shun,
And loves to live i' the sun,
Seeking the food he eats,
And pleased with what he gets,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather."

"Is that as you like it, my dears?... My cousin has quite a fancy for the song. He's a sort of trimardeur who once made plays.... He wrote 'em and acted 'em, but, son, I live 'em."

Then, seated upon the grass, he spoke half jestingly, and yet with a serious note of reminiscence in his voice:

"Sometimes I'm Jacques, that melancholy cuss. Sometimes I'm Puck—merry Robin Goodfellow. You wouldn't believe it, now, would you? Sometimes, Touchstone. Often I am Ariel—

"'Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In the cowslip's bell I lie;
There I crouch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily:
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.'"

"I have been Romeo, but no more for me.... Nance, you red-headed little jade, how old are you?"

We were preparing to leave. We weren't interested. What did we care about all of this? Who were Ariel and Puck, anyhow? I could see that Nance did not like one bit being a "red-headed jade." She was always very sensitive about the color of her hair and the freckles on her nose.

"Don't go, my kiddies," he suddenly pleaded. "Look-e-here. I'm going to make a big, crackling fire in a minute. Then we'll have a bucket of water from the river. I've a kettle and some eggs aboard the Columbine.... Say, we'll have the one great time of our lives!"

It took no unusual amount of insisting to make us enter into a game like that with zest. And O, the mysteries of the interior of Mademoiselle Columbine. O, the stories of caliphs and kings and grand viziers and robbers and things. And they were friends of his, too. Personal friends!

It was unpleasantly late when we stole away home to scoldings and to bed. He told us to refer 'em to him, and he'd fix things with the grown-ups. Our parting glimpse, as we ran across the pasture, was Jean François, seated in the grass within the circle of the glowing light of the embers, talking to his pipe. Pretty soon, we knew for he told us, he'd be in bed. He used the stars, he remarked, to button the covers down, and he'd dip 'em into the river to put them out in the morning.

CHAPTER TWO

THE JADE AND THE INQUISITION

It is time you knew old Doctor Felix Longstreet, Nance Gwyn's Waltonian grandfather. For short, she frequently designated him as "The G. F." His chief happiness lay in the hours he stole from his practise to put in with a rod and minnows on Eagle Creek and in rearing his granddaughter, both of whose parents were dead, in the most unconventional manner possible. With him lived a maiden sister, Miss Barbara. Her gods were convention and propriety. They were the doctor's devils. Truly, Nance lived "between the devil and the deep blue sea!"

"The world of men," I once heard the old doctor remark, "is divided into two classes: those who understand that a river has a heart and those who do not care a tinker's damn if it hasn't." Upon his retiring from the room a half-hour after this sentence was delivered, Aunt Barbara, after glancing timidly about to be sure that he had gone, ventured to Nance and me, engaged in making a small boat upon the portico, the following:

"He is right. Always right, for that matter!" she exclaimed with vehemence, nervously patting her foot upon the floor. "Now I know of no one who has so many characteristics in common with a stream as my brother Felix. He can be as full of peace and happiness and gentle little ripples to-day, then to-morrow as picturesque with whippy, foamy whitecaps and occasional squalls as the river he loves."

"Very true, Aunt Barbara," commented Nance with deliberateness, "and I know he can flow by in the most exasperatingly placid, disinterested manner possible. Also, should the occasion arise, quickly fill up with ice!"

It would be unfair, however, not to tell you that a more gentle man or true never lived than this old river god. Indeed, he is the veritable reincarnation of Izaak Walton. It is true old Izaak tended his linen-draper's shop, while Doctor Longstreet tends his pills. It was Jean François who made the remark that the chief difference lay in the fact that the one coated the body on the outside while the other coats it on the inside. Our pedler also pointed out, again, that both were very much alike in loving a friend, a pipe with a bit of philosophy, a quiet stream, and a favorite rod with which to go a-fishing.

Just how long Doctor Longstreet has practised medicine in Oldmeadow, I shall not presume to say. It seems to me as if always he has been there; always smelling delightfully of a mixture of strong tobacco smoke and carbolic acid; always riding over the countryside, or carrying through the town a pair of small leather saddle-bags or a fishing pole. Very frequently both. Nance, who was in a position to know, said that one side of these cases contained pills and the other angle worms.

At any rate, I know that seemingly a very long time ago, in comparison with myself, he was born in Virginia. In his youth he was graduated from the University at Charlottesville, and later from the Jefferson Medical College. Upon receiving his diploma, entitling him to practise medicine, he came directly to Oldmeadow. Except for four years spent as a surgeon in the Confederate army, he has given his life to this old Kentucky town on the Ohio river. For the present this is enough of him, save to mention that other than Nance, with the sun-colored hair; the river, which embraces "goin' a-fishin'"; and General Robert E. Lee, a name symbolizing all that Virginia and the South mean to him, he loves the little town, with its old-fashioned customs and traditions, which has been the background for most of his activities.

The morning following our glorious introduction to the magnificent Jean François I was out early and bound for the commons. I scarcely expected Nance to be up. I felt that there would be something intimate and personal, perhaps undefinable, it is true, between this master of the happy caravan and myself because we were both men. I had made up my mind that he was a woman-hater. As I hurried along the street my plans were brutally shattered, for whom should I encounter but the red-headed jade herself, grinning quite wickedly, even though her hand was tightly gripped in that of her Aunt Barbara, whose serious features were drawn together in grim determination.

"I want you, too, Charles Reubelt," said Miss Longstreet curtly, and with evident disapproval not only in her tone, but in the look with which she surveyed my full diminutive person.

"Yes, we want you, Charles Reubelt," Nance reiterated in close, but undetected, imitation of her Aunt Barbara.

Now while this really very charming spinster had no actual command over me, having quite tangible parents two blocks away, yet I acknowledged an assumed authority felt by every boy and girl in Oldmeadow. So, yielding, I fell in behind, marching meekly to Doctor Longstreet's office.

We entered in single file, Miss Longstreet shoving Nance unceremoniously before her. I lingered, cap in hand, near the open door.

"Felix," she began, in a voice slightly agitated by the fear of the unknown result in approaching the old doctor upon any subject, "do you know where these children were last night?"

"No, my dear Barbara," he replied with irony, looking up from a series of powders he was proportioning with his jack-knife on a piece of newspaper; "were they drowned?"

"No, but she might well have been, for all that you look after her!" she exclaimed, now leaving me out of the arraignment and giving herself solely to Nance.

After carefully lifting each powder onto a small square piece of paper, torn from his writing pad, folding them neatly, and placing all of them in an envelope which he proceeded to seal, then to write directions upon the back, he again gave his attention to his sister.

"So she has been swimming with Charles Reubelt," he said, in mock horror.

"For heaven's sake, no, Felix. Don't you dare suggest such a thing to her.... The way you do talk!"

"What has she been doing then?" he asked, looking severely over the rims of his spectacles at the offending young lady.

With slow and effective emphasis Aunt Barbara brought her accusation:

"They were out on the common until ten o'clock last night with a tramp, that's what!" You will notice that again I was included in her remarks.

"With what?... With who?" he exclaimed to Nance.

"With Jean François," came the brave reply of the jade.

"Barbara, Barbara," he exclaimed in quick, whispered hisses.

"Yes, my brother," she replied, rising to the seriousness of the occasion.

"They say that his ears are pointed! That he has legs and feet like a goat!"

"How shockingly unbecoming," and she gazed reproachfully at the culprits.

The doctor glared viciously at each of us in turn; blew his nose resonantly; shook himself like a big Newfoundland, and then, much to Miss Longstreet's chagrin and our astonishment, burst into hearty laughter.

"What!" cried he. "So you two are just discovering my friend, Jean François?... Poet, pedler, philosopher, mender of umbrellas, and player on the pipes," said he, drolly imitating our friend of the night before.

"You knew him all of the time?" I exclaimed.

"Let me see," said the doctor reminiscently; "when did I first discover the happy pedler?... O, yes, the second year after the Abbé Picot came to live in Oldmeadow. I remember now. It has been some five or six years ago.... That's what you youngsters get by going away every summer instead of remaining at home with your betters."

"Is he a real poet?" ventured Nance, with her accustomed irrelevance.

"Certainly," came the reply. "Hasn't he said so? Besides, he knows his Shakespeare like a scholar.... Cultivate him."

"Cultivate!" cried the now fully alarmed Aunt Barbara. "Felix, you are positively indecorous.... Cultivate a tramp?"

"Barbara, my dear, I assure you, he is quite a gentleman. He likes my pills, he loves the river like a brother, and he knows his Shakespeare. That is quite enough.... What do you want, my dear unwearied sister—a frilled shirt-front? I've seen many a one bowing over you in the old days all togged out in finery who hadn't half so great a heart and half so genuine a manner.

"Now, Nance," he said, turning from the thoroughly squelched Aunt Barbara to us, "Jean François comes with his happy caravan—a name I gave his outfit the first time I saw it—every year when May or June is at her bonniest. Nobody knows just when or where he comes from, and no one, who loves him, cares. All of a sudden he's here, that's all. He always camps on the green, where you discovered him last night, overlooking the river. Sometimes he's here most of the summer. Sometimes it's just a week, or a month. Then, like he comes, he just goes.

"'It's a fever,' he said to me once in answer to a question as to why he was off, when I met him on the river road, bound west. 'It's a fever that you, old Saddle-bags, can't pill or cuss away.... Au revoir,' and his Columbine moved away.

"Occasionally he returns during the late September days. It is only for a week or a day, however.... I can always tell that he is coming by the wild geese flying. He is a migratory bird—this Jean François of ours."

If the doctor continued to speak of the pedler to Aunt Barbara, we never knew it. Nance and I slipped through the door into the June sunshine and hurried across the village to the common, where camped the master of the happy caravan.

CHAPTER THREE

JEAN FRANÇOIS' VAST POSSESSIONS

Would it make you happy to know that you possessed, as your heart's own, a long, white, alluring road? A joyous, lovable, intimate road which leads over the hills through a thousand friendly trees, all sheltered beneath the wide blue sky. A road of many moods: a gentle road; a brave, true road; a morning road; a smiling, sunset road; a devil-may-care, starlit road; a lover's moon-whitened road; a road that goes and goes, never returns, yet always is homeward bound. Home to the dingle, the glen, the sheltering greenwood, the chattering little river; the camp of the gipsy. A road bordered by flower-faced fields with drowsing villages, now and then, like ancient inns with bread and cheese and milk.

Such is Jean François' great highway. All the morning he spent telling us of le long du trimard, to use an expression frequently upon his lips. He told us of the men of the road, their dreams, their strange and adventurous lives. Often he spoke simply of amazing and unlooked-for deeds of heroism. He sang of nymphs, of dryads with wondrous beauty. He talked of marvelous, strong-limbed satyrs, of gentle fauns stealing through the wild-wood. In whispered words, with bated breath, as if he told of sacred secret things, he described to us the days of his brother, the great god Pan.

"There are those," said he, "who say that Pan is dead. They are but blind. Some day, if life is kind, I shall take you to him. When once you hear the immortal music of his oaten pipes you will have discovered the passionate note which will lead you, lead you down the road, over the hills into the far away where youth and the greater love abide, as was meant from the beginning of the world.... Long live the great Pan," cried he.

Then, as if suddenly coming back to this as from another world, his eyes lost their preternatural expression and became wistful and kind and merry.

"And what do you think of it all, my children?" said he, with a sweep of his hand, which was meant to include all the splendid things he had been telling us. It never seemed to occur to him that he doubtless spoke of much which was utter mystery so far as we were concerned. But that was characteristic of the man. He talked to Nance and me in very much the same manner in which he spoke with Doctor Longstreet.

Nance's reply came as a surprise to me. I was glad her Aunt Barbara was not numbered among those present. With slow and serious mien she said:

"Some day, Jean François, I shall be a gipsy with you."

"Ah, my little jade," said he, with an obvious note of sympathy and gratitude in his voice, "so you have heard the call of the road?... Yes, there will come a time when we'll go hand in hand down the traffic lands. We'll roam forever and a day, forever and away.... You shall help me cry my wares."

Then, seeing in Nance's face a look which took him at his word, and upon mine questionings bordering upon alarm, he burst into hearty laughter, restoring our poise, and cried:

"You must not take too seriously, my dears, the nonsense of the happy pedler!"

"What of you?" he asked, quickly turning to me. "Have you heard it too—the call of the road? No?"

As for me, I'm distinctly of the town. So, using a phrase kin to his own, I replied:

"Oldmeadow belongs to me," and I launched into a boyish panegyric of my birthplace.

It is a quaint bit of a village, where spectacled old ladies in black lace caps poke case-knives about the roots of rose-bushes, while elderly gentlemen with canes hobble over flag-stone sidewalks to their favorite seats in the spicy, leathery, brown-papery atmosphere of the store. In some features Oldmeadow seems even older than the river, though I am assured by cracker-barrel historians that this is not a fact. It has been here long enough, however, to become a fixed part of the landscape, which is no more likely to change than the course of the Ohio, or the shape of the Kentucky hills away to the south. The older folk are careful not to die until they have faithfully imparted to the younger people all of their old-fashioned courtesy, gentle virtues, assorted prejudices, and cures for mumps, measles, and rheumatism.

"Oldmeadow herself—" I began, but Jean François interrupted.

"Quite right, son. 'She' is the word. She is distinctly an elderly maiden lady with old-time beauty; a sort of adorable shyness; a certain charming primness which sits upon her head like a Sunday bonnet. She takes a friendly interest in the love affairs of the young if duly governed by a proper regard for propriety. Her conventional amusements she defends from the parson with roguish pleasantry. Over the evening coffee she takes a half-frightened delight in mild gossip.... That's your aunt Oldmeadow," concluded Jean François, with a smile.

Oldmeadow rests—I think you will agree with me that "rests" is the word—just high enough to be secure from the June rise, and very timidly peeps, as if she were fully expecting to see some naughty naked little boys in swimming, through the willows over the banks of the most beautiful river in the world. The great, lazy Ohio slowly winds into view from among the hazy hills in the east, lingers for a moment after a manner most friendly, and then, with assumed indifference, drifts away to disappear among other hazy hills in the west.... Do you remember how we used to ask the grown-ups, "Where does the river come from?"... The river is made very human, and the town, which has no railroad to this day, is kept in touch with the outside world by the big, white-collared steamboats which plow their way daily between Louisville and Cincinnati.

When you climb the high banks and get into the village the sidewalks are of large flat stones, with peppergrass and green old moss growing between them and about the roots of the gnarled honey-locusts which have stood for a hundred years along the primitive gutters. The houses are delightfully old-fashioned and quaint. Some are mere plain white cottages far back from the streets, where vines cover the latticed porches. In the lawns circles and crude stars are made for peonies and sweet williams. Some, however, are more pretentious, being built of stone or brick, with occasional pillars, colonial in manner, with wide old arches above the damp, moss-covered slabs of the floor.

"Your village should be very happy," remarked Jean François, after my conclusion. "Does she not have the river to sing to her; the tree-clad hills for shelter; the good blue sky to smile upon her; grave old homes with green sunny gardens to lend dignity; and the laughing loves of youth to keep warm her heart?... There's the village for a road like mine!"

Oldmeadow possesses three points of greater pride: her hospitality, which needs no encomium; the "college," of which more anon; and the Old Mansion of Many Pillars.... It was of this home that Jean François now asked the history. Every child in the village knew it, for, was it not, with its mystery, its ghosts, its inviting splendor, the heart's desire of Nance and me ever since, for us, time began?

It stands in an ample yard, amid old pines, locust trees, and lilac bushes, overlooking the river. It is a great square house of the colonial type, with low wings to the right and left. The windows are large, deep-seated, and many-paned. The enhancing feature, however, is the big, broad portico, the roof of which is supported by noble Corinthian columns, spotted and green with moss and ivy. This house is not only the most elegant, inside and out, in Oldmeadow to-day, but in that time it possessed an atmosphere of aristocratic seclusion, amounting in the minds of the children and negroes to mystery.

Until recent years it had been the property of an old French refugee of the ancient régime. His father had fled from the court of Louis XIV to Louisiana. The son, years later, having gotten into some trouble over a woman, killing his man, which, so far as we are concerned, is another story, came into the river valley of Kentucky and at vast expense built the old mansion as it now stands. To all appearances he had wrought with the expectations of some one sharing the home with him. It was made for happiness, love, and children. At first he was a jolly, gay young fellow, seeking society. After a few years, however, he gradually withdrew from his companions, became silent, morose, and lived altogether to himself. His townspeople saw him seldom, his servant making the necessary trips for supplies. He led the life of a recluse and a student. The reason for this always remained unknown. It served for many a fireside topic on winter evenings. Old men spun gossipy anecdotes concerning it, and the old ladies, romantic tales. Youth built melodramatic love stories for him, while children made of it the source of fantasy.

Finally, when he sickened and died, beside his servant, Doctor Felix Longstreet alone was with him. Unless the doctor knew, and no one dared question him, the secret of the old Frenchman's life passed with his soul. It was the physician, in compliance with the last commands of the dead gentleman, who corresponded with the heir designated by the will. This was Monsieur Jacques Picot, of Paris, whom he notified of his inheritance and the conditions attached thereto. These were, briefly: That he must come to America and occupy the house; that he could neither sell nor give the property away; that at his demise, however, he could bequeath the estate to whomever he chose. In case the Abbé Picot would not accept these conditions, everything was to revert to a more distant relative, Captain Martin Felon of the French army. It was said the original owner of the old home made these strange demands because of his desire to force all of his kith and kin from their native country. He was an intense American, and had not forgotten that his father had been a fugitive.

"Ah," cried Jean François, nodding his head with a mysterious air, "that accounts for many things.... Some day I'll take Rogue, Columbine, and Pierrett, go down among the bayous, and discover why a gentleman of the old régime lost heart. Then, maybe, I'll tell you about it.

"Meantime, my dears, don't you think it would be pretty fine for you to grow up and live in this old home as your very own? Yes?... Monsieur l'Abbé cannot live always, I know. I happen to be slightly acquainted with him. He is very kindly disposed toward you. There's no telling what he might do.

"How would it suit you, Nance Gwyn of the sun-colored hair, to one day be mistress of the mansion?"

"I am not quite certain," said she, for the old home had quite a strong hold upon the imagination of Nance as well as all the rest of Oldmeadow's children, "but I think I should take Columbine and you and the road, first, Jean François."

"First?" exclaimed the pedler, with a humorous twinkle in his eye.

"First," came the very certain reply from the jade; "for some day I mean to have them both."

CHAPTER FOUR

THE MISADVENTURE OF A CIRCUS

After a great deal of pleading, bringing to bear everything with which I was acquainted in the art of persuasion, I had succeeded in inducing Jean François to leave his happy caravan for a day and to become friends with our back yard. My family, be it understood, were dining in the country, leaving the premises to my undisputed control from early morning until late afternoon. Our pedler came with trepidation. He scented mischief of a kind which he did not find congenial. He had the greatest aversion to unexpectedly meeting people whom he did not know or did not like. Also he demanded room—the wide spaces of the open. To come about a house, or to enter an enclosure where escape would be fraught with embarrassment, was to him exceedingly painful. His apparent panic reminded me strongly of some timid, uncertainly tamed animal bravely trying to receive the caresses of human beings. Persistence prevailed, however, and he stole around the house, like someone bent upon a hopeless task, and seated himself upon the woodpile.

He looked about him with evident disapproval. Then, removing Pierrett from his mouth, he addressed her with elaborate politeness:

"Say, my sweet hussy, did you ever notice the personality of a crack in the fence? Have you ever given study to the sins of back yards?... Yes?... Just the other day I heard the old doctor say that you could tell the condition of a man's liver by the appearance of his back yard.... He's right about it."

In general esteem our back yard, if you choose to remember, was second only to the attic. The crack in the fence was its thorn in the flesh. Of course the kitchen opened onto it, or rather, it opened onto the kitchen, for this warm bread-scented producer of tarts is not to be compared in point of importance with this plot sacredly set apart for make-believers. Here, however, is a fitting place to state that for an inn the kitchen suited admirably, and Betty, though black-a-visaged as a pirate, made a very respectable Mine Host.

The right side was flanked by an impassable high board fence which Grown-ups, I have since learned, built to hide their back-yard sins from their neighbors, the Greens, who possessed a similar assortment. To us, however, it was a stockade erected by no less a personage than our comrade Daniel Boone, famous for his cigars, and served to protect us from the Indians who, in reality, were the half-dozen assorted little Greens, then on the summit of the stone age. These savages weren't at all neighborly, a thing for which we never ceased to be thankful. The really splendid part about it was that at any time, without other warning than a sudden whoop, rocks were likely to be thrown over the fence at our unsuspecting heads. Though once and a while producing a scalp wound upon our side, it was altogether a very harmless play, with just enough excitement to keep it alive. Besides, in the end, all of the stones the Greenlets ever threw away always found their way back to their side of the stockade. And what matter to any of us if it caused the mothers on either side to cease speaking except in company, and the fathers to have only a mere business bow?

In our back yard was the stable, two parts of which are worthy of mention. There was the hay-loft, reached by a steep and rickety ladder through a hole in the floor, a fine old place in which to hide from visiting dressed-up small boys whose presence was, on general principles, undesirable. Then there were great billows of hay, with sweet, breezy odors, on which one might be cast away on a pitchfork raft for days and days. Above, on the rafters, were drab-colored nests of mud-daubing martins, which easily became gulls, albatross, or distant sails, as the moment might demand.

The very best place of all, as you will hereinafter discover, was our buggy shed. The floor was nothing more than the good, hard earth. Here and there were little wallowing nests of dust made by some cheerful hen while engaged in an indolent sun-bath. On one side hung the harness, which might be pressed into service for circus purposes. Along the braces lay the monkey-wrench, hammer, nails, and delectable boxes of fascinating axle grease. The rancid smell of this yellowish-black article of lubrication is indissolubly associated with heaven-sent memories of the happiest days. True I never tried it, though I believe you once did with painful results; I always wanted to spread it on a white slice of bread and eat it. The axle grease was a cause for sin. More anon.

In the center stood our phaeton, which served from a coach and four to a low-raking revenue cutter. Behind it was the jolt wagon—so named because of a lack of springs. This caused very delightful sensations to those playing train within, when the vehicle was being driven at a trot over a rough road. Now one of the privileges to be bought, often at a high price, from the hired man, was the unalloyed joy of putting great daubs of grease upon the axles of the aforesaid phaeton and farm wagon. I have often done without my second piece of chocolate pie, gladly thrusting it surreptitiously down the throat of this previously mentioned man of many virtues, just to get to help at this task. Something second unto it was being allowed to spin the recently attended wheel before removing the jack from beneath it. All of this that you may know the charms of axle grease.... O, the memories of that day of many sins!

Nance, who lived just back of me, with an alley between, had a habit which was good or bad as it suited my purpose. It was to come through a gate in her back fence, which mine did not possess, and enter my domain through a crack in the fence. This entrance, which had been made long ago by the removal of a board, was a constant source of annoyance to me. Since her first appearance years ago, the crack had been worn smooth and glossy by much passing of girl frocks. She insisted upon being played with and the pity of her possessing neither father, mother, sisters, or brothers of her own was all that saved the crack being securely nailed. It was only when she attempted to force dolls upon me that I sternly rebelled. Of course it was only in the back yard and upon the common that she was allowed my comradeship. When we were fishing or swimming she could not come, though she shed many tears and entered various protests.

Now of all times this was one when a visit from her was not wanted. Jean François acted like she would be welcome, it is true. Just why he so fancied her was then a mystery to me. I'll leave it to you. I had prepared for a really wicked, good time all alone with the happy pedler. In the morning, after playing Indian with the Greens, I hoped we should be buccaneers in the hay until Aunt Bet began to get dinner. Then we were to slip into the house and slide down the banisters until time to eat. The whole afternoon was to be spent greasing the phaeton and the jolt wagon. There was a new box of axle grease, and a splendid pine paddle with which to apply it.... Suppose you had all of such a great day planned and a red-headed little jade, with a very white frock, taking her welcome for granted, squeezed through the crack of your fence.... Jean François says you can always count upon a woman making her appearance just when you are off on a particularly masculine jaunt.

Well, the Indians had to be postponed. She had once taken a rather awkward left-handed part in a battle and had gone bellowing through the fence, a most unbecoming woman. She wasn't any heroine. The scar, which her Aunt Barbara feels very sure will disappear, may be found in that blessed red hair to this day. So politeness forbade warfare. The hay proved better. It is true I noticed her eyes grow a bit wide with fear as she arose on the rickety ladder. This was fostered by Jean François following closely behind, playing sailor. We made believe that she was a respectable merchantman, while I was a pirate, and the pedler the man-of-war. I swooped down upon her only to be chased and hard put by the shot and shell of the larger vessel. I feel sure she got the worst of the fight. Then, in the storm, we covered her with hay until her weak little protest from somewhere beneath the billows made me uneasy for her ever again reaching port.

It was the banisters where she surprised all of us.

"I do it all the time at home," she informed us proudly. Just then I ceased to sympathize with her lack of a mother. I, too, wished for a G. F. who domineered a maiden aunt.

"You see," said she, "I never walk down stairs unless Aunt Barbara is around."

Then she illustrated her ability for us, to almost knocking the newel post from its dignified position at the bottom of the stair. We stood watching with awe and a trifle of envy. It was an unfortunate thing in some respects to have parents. Here, however, our joy was interrupted by a call demanding Nance to report for dinner. She departed, and I was left to dissipate on an old-fashioned circular baluster. Jean François became a spectator, saying that he drew the line at such amusements.

It was the afternoon which caused the telling of this story. History was made. We had the jack under the front wheel of the jolt wagon when she appeared. The umbrella man was unscrewing the nut while I worked the grease. Her frock was a new one. A trace of recent tears told of the folly of playing respectable merchantman upon a sea of hay. Here the wheel was lifted off, placed against the wall, and the glistening axle, already suffering from over attention, was liberally applied with lubricant. When we turned to replace the wheel, there was the jade sitting innocently against the hub. She stepped aside for us, only to expose a neat black ring printed upon a part of her frock which prophesied what awaited her within the immediate future. At first she was inclined to cry. Instead, upon our laughing at her, she became impudent. As each wheel came off, she promptly sat against it, regularly increasing the number of rings. Then she insisted on at least putting one paddle full on an axle. After that she must be allowed to attend one entire wheel by herself, of course, allowing one of us to remove it. This we did cheerfully. Were we not interested in getting her just as black as possible? Had she not grown exceedingly bold and saucy?... Next she decided to taste the grease. One little finger, on the tip of which was a bit of black tar, was stuck delicately on her outstretched tongue, while she made a face for our delectation.

Suddenly she turned upon us with the information that she was a circus.

"A whole circus?" asked Jean François derisively.

"A whole circus, and I'm going to perform," she informed us.

She then insisted that Jean François and I go away, as she was going to do her act on the horizontal bar. In fact, she commanded us to leave, but whatever we chose to do she nevertheless intended to do her trick. The pedler promptly turned his back and began the imitation of the kind of music played when the acrobats are out. As for me I stood my ground. She needed an audience, I insisted. Who ever heard of a circus without an audience? Then, quite to my astonishment, Nance proceeded to skin the cat. She sputtered something about getting even at her party—I remembered this afterward—as she heaved her legs between her hands, and a multitude of clothes obscured her features. I was somewhat awed by this bit of prowess. I respected her for it. Still, I, myself, fully intended, so soon as I became a man, to walk on the ceiling. Also I found myself wondering if the immortal Jean François numbered this among his accomplishments.

Just then the climax came, in the shape of her Aunt Barbara, who, silently and suddenly, like death, stood before us.

"Aunt Barbara," she explained as she dropped, a tearful little bundle of apologies, into the dust, "Aunt Barbara, I didn't want to do it before Charles. Really, I didn't, but I just couldn't get him to go away.... I hated to do it, really, but he simply would not leave."

Then to see her hurried through the crack in the fence with a sharp spank, as she stooped through the opening, almost convinced me that she was one thing on earth God had made without any purpose.

Jean François says there isn't any greater creative force in this world for pity than a very tearful, snuffy, turned-up, little girl-nose.

CHAPTER FIVE

TIMID CONQUEST COMES TO TOWN

Less than a month following the events clustered about the rise and fall of the unfortunate circus, a certain tow-headed, freckled-faced boy, whom I knew once upon a time, long ago, might have been found seated on the lar-board side of the ferry float, hidden away from his fellow men, that he might contemplate. I am sure Izaak Walton knew a deal about boys, and that much of his gentle philosophy was developed into tangibility because he occasionally consulted them.

Early in the morning Jean François and Doctor Longstreet had tramped up the river seeking a favorite fishing pool. They had invited the boy to go with them, but even the all-day companionship of his two heroes could not withdraw him from the problem which now completely occupied his mind and heart.... Nance was spending her time at home, doubtless enjoying certain triumphs of the previous night. The fellows couldn't interest him. The river—his river now—alone seemed adequate. The great stream lay at his feet, stretching away to the Indiana hills, beautiful, calm, majestic, yet sympathetic and inviting to confidences. At any rate, so it seemed to the boy in whose life something new, mysterious, wonderful was coming to birth.

On the evening previous to this thoughtful dabbling in the water there had happened in the life of this boy an event. Not such an event as it might be if you were to find the rainbow's end; more important than if you were granted three wishes by the queen of fairies. You have been expecting these rather commonplace happenings all of your life. This particular event came without the slightest warning or preparation, at least so far as he knew; like you might wake some morning and find your wings attached behind your ears instead of on your shoulder-blades, where you are really expecting to wear them. The boy, it might be said, was made of marbles and tops and little mud puddles; of rivers and trees and all out of doors; of Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, and Kit Carson; and, of nights by the winter's fireside, of good adventurous books. For him all of the rest of the world was yet to be created. To him his mother wasn't a woman; she was just mother. Girls, like flies, were inevitable nuisances, mostly to be ignored, but occasionally shot at with a broken bit of rubber band.... He didn't even know that he was ugly. Yet he had learned early that the boys best suited for "knux," fishin', and the like had freckles, snub-noses, and cow-licks. Had not father often remonstrated with mother at too much washing, insisting that it was part of a small boy's portion to get dirty and to sniffle? Hadn't he seen through old Doctor Longstreet's derision when he would take such evident delight in saying to hovering little motherettes:

"Madame, I congratulate you upon the hideousness of your son. Thank God for ugly boys—they make men. A pretty boy, madame, is a misprint—the wrong title under the wrong picture. I congratulate you!... Ah, it reminds me of the story of—"

Never mind the doctor's story. Sufficient to say it was not about a pirate or a captain of the guards, or I'd tell it here. One thing: he was generally right about boys, angle worms, and pills.

So, in the late afternoon of yesterday, when he was informed by his mother that Nance—Jean François' red-headed jade—was to have a birthday party, and that he was expected to go, his heart became sick and then rebellious. In the first place she held no interest for him. She had always been in the world, he supposed. He couldn't remember when she hadn't lived over the alley. It seemed that always she had made herself conspicuous through the crack in the fence. For the first time he genuinely regretted that he had not nailed it up long ago.

Then another good reason for protest, upon the suggestion that it would not be healthful for him if he failed to attend the party, was the fact that he would have to wash his feet and put on shoes and stockings. It was under such circumstances he wished he belonged to the Rices, who lived on a shanty boat, fishing for a living. The little Rices never had to wash except accidentally as they got wet helping their father trace his trot-lines, or for fun when they went swimming. This time he pleaded with his mother to let him run to the river and "go-in"; this being a sure way of getting amusement out of an otherwise unpleasant task. However, mother was very serious and father looked like a newspaper with legs to it. He refused to be inveigled into sympathy. So the boy was duly scrubbed, shined, stocking-and-shoed. Thus, feeling very stiff, dry all over, and exceedingly unlike Robinson Crusoe, he was thrust unceremoniously through the crack in the fence with a parting injunction similar to the one he had seen administered to Nance not a great while ago. He did not cry, however, but, very much of a martyr, he tramped with reckless delight over Aunt Barbara's flower-beds to the front door and lifted the knocker. Here he paused for fully a minute with timid dignity, then let it fall. It seemed an earthquake.

When he had once gotten in, had his hat, a very superfluous piece of wearing apparel, disposed of, he was formally presented to many uncomfortable-looking small boys in the strange disguise of Sunday suits and fluttering, beribboned little girls who now, for the first time, seemed to have the occasion better in hand than himself. The dry feeling now left him for one that was hot and smothery, seemingly caused by having on too much clothing. He accepted the chair thrust beneath him by her Aunt Barbara, whose glance was one of withering disapproval. Knowing that he had surely broken some rule of conduct, his eyes sought the open window as if measuring his chance for escape. Evidently none presented itself, for he turned resignedly to the gay group of tiny flutterers about him. He mentally calculated how many times he could chin the curtain pole if he were allowed to remove his coat; he wondered if she ever tried it; and remembering the cat-skinning episode he concluded that she was no doubt a practised hand. Suddenly he straightened up and regained a portion of self-respect as he thought how he could throw the whole lot of them out of the window if he chose.

It was then that the games began. Even the boys—Jim, "Capt." "Leggins," and the rest—seemed more at ease, and the chances were, from appearances, he believed, that they were actually going to have some fun. Before he knew just how it happened, and wholly unconscious of its nature, he was in a game in which the reward, or penalty it would have seemed to him, was kissing the upturned cheek of some fluttering little maid. Very abruptly, so it seemed, Nance stood before him. There was a look of mischief in her dancing eyes, a droop of mock timidity about her mouth, and a round, flushed, dimpled cheek was held for his lips. As the other girls were always inclined to let him alone, this was a part of the game he had not anticipated. Just as a drowning man thinks in a second of every wicked act of his life, so the boy thought of every worm he had ever put on her, of every pinch, every twitch of her hair, of every bit of tantalizing of which he had ever been guilty. Most of all he remembered the vengeance she had promised him for refusing to go away while she skinned the cat.... At any rate, there she stood, her happy little face sparkling from without a perfect mass of fluffy red curls, that, to the boy, seemed quite as bright and beautiful as the sunshine on the river in the early morning. Beneath this hair and lifted cheek stood an eager small body, very much frilled and furbelowed, which to him, for the first time, was very mysterious and alluring. It was decidedly a new experience for him. For a moment he hesitated, uneasy, blushing vigorously; then he glanced behind. Yes, it was there and open! One bound and he was through the window, running and stumbling toward the crack in the fence. For a second Nance gazed in amused amazement at the place left vacant, and out into the night into which he had escaped. Then she turned to another and the game continued. Within her heart was a feeling of deep satisfaction.

The boy was down in the buggy shed, his coat off, hanging on the bar skinning the cat several times in rapid succession.

"Huh," he exclaimed as he came to a sudden stop. "I bet she couldn't do it agin!" It might be well to here record the fact that so far as anybody ever knew, she never did.

All of this was what passed in review as he sat paddling in the water that June morning. He wondered what Jean François would say when he heard about it. He was filled with pride and humiliation all at one time. An unusual relationship was now evident. She was in the ascendancy.... He wanted to think it all out, if it were possible, and the river, rippling about his bare feet, felt very cool and very soothing.

CHAPTER SIX

THE JADE, A NONENTITY, BECOMES THE ILLUSTRIOUS NANCE

When our grandfathers were snub-nosed little boys, quaintly dressed in the toggery of near a century ago, every town in the South boasted of its college. It was long before the coming of the state universities and the heavily endowed Church institutions. They were usually the property of some pompous individual whose pedantry and assumption, among the simple folk about him, went by the name of culture and learning. He was usually looked upon as being something sacred. His authority upon matters generally, and letters specifically, was indisputable. That being a day when, though there were no poor, there were also no rich, ancestry and one's mind counted for something. Therefore these old scholars, whose charlatanry was what they deemed an honest part of pedagogy, were honored with the very highest esteem. These schools soon acquired an atmosphere very dear to the Southern heart: a quiet air of good breeding. This was frequently abused by the institutions themselves inasmuch as it was made an inducement to secure attendance. To-day our very same grandparents are not so proud of the education attained, for that was usually very meager, but of the aristocratic name left to the now tottering buildings.

One of the most popular of all of these in its day was Oldmeadow College. Even to this time its legends are passed by careful and reverent tongues to those born in so unfortunate a period as not to have been able to attend it. In the narrow vision of many of our cracker-barrel philosophers there never existed men so erudite, so acceptably great as many of the old professors. Now and then, with modifications, this was true. Our village had no doubt whatever that she was the moral and culture center of Kentucky. It might please you to know that from Lexington, with Transylvania University, down to the least hamlet possessed of her college, every town in the State thought the same thing ... feel reasonably sure each one of them was right!

There was but one part of Oldmeadow which might boast of being anything like a hill. On the western edge of the town beside the river this knoll, many feet higher than the surrounding country, was entirely within the college campus. At its apex was the college itself. A brick building consisting of a basement with three stories and a half above it—these stories were higher than the average—made a rather imposing structure which sat like a monitor upon a stool overlooking the conduct of the village spread before it. On the first floor were an assembly and two recitation rooms. In the five apartments on the second lived the President and his family. The third was devoted to music and class rooms. On the pilot-house-like tower, which crowned the building, there rested a huge bell once the property of a boastful steamboat, the General Litell, which had blown up at a point just below town, in a vain attempt to run faster than a rival. I used to believe the bell, rope and all, had been neatly blown over upon the roof, but I am now inclined to believe that friends must have rescued it from the sand-bar for its present position. It is still a mystery to me how it was ever mounted to where it is to-day.

Now all of this was very long ago, before you knew anything about Oldmeadow and my river beside it. When we first knew the village, you will remember, all that was left of the college was the building, the bell, and the wonderful view of the most beautiful stream in the world, from its windows, or its top. Standing beside the relic of the General Litell, you may see the great Ohio wandering idly, vagabondishly, through the valley, until it looks like a silver thread losing itself in the misty distance. Just think of being able to see, on a clear sunny morning, twenty miles or more of the river you love. By your side it drifts, broad, full of strength, in pleasing sinuosity, covered by a thousand hurrying little ripples. Beyond it becomes smoother, the yellow of the water turning a clearer green, and motionless it winds in and out among the farms and woodland until it may be followed only by the line of blue vapor between the hills. Here and there hangs the smoke of a steamboat; a forest shuts it momentarily from sight only that you may catch a glimpse of silver sheen, lake-like, smiling in the happy sunshine; a farmhouse, as a silent, contemplative fisherman, sits here and there on the bank; and over it all, as if with satisfaction the master builder were viewing his work, there broods the great mystery.

Though all of these things remained, when we came into our inheritance the college was no longer a "college," but had fallen into the vulgar times of being used as the public school building. Here some erstwhile student held forth for six months in the year, teaching on the first floor, living on the second, his children making a playhouse out of the third.

I will not presume to say how long I had been attending the "college" when, upon a certain cheerful September morning, I saw old Doctor Longstreet come walking up the campus with the timid fingers of our Nance held protectingly in his own. She seemed very much scared, a trifle knock-kneed, and just a bit too starched up to be as pretty as I acknowledged her in my heart. She passed us—a group of boys at play—with scarcely a look of recognition. I watched them climb the steps into the building, her two huge red plaits seeming to be about all there was of her. These same plaits looked quite lonely and as if they wanted to turn and run for it. I do not think I have ever seen her so humble, so unassuming as she was that day. To be sure it did not last long. Before another week she had figuratively made a crack in the fence and slipped through to victory.

During these early years in school, to prove my prowess, when I believed her looking, I never lost an opportunity to stand on my head. I did not realize at the time how ungallant was the undue advantage I took of her. Long, long since I have learned that she secretly practised it at home. As a consequence, that which at first so won her admiration soon was the cause of contempt. Though I could never know, she was sure that she could do it with better grace than her one-time hero. I am now told that I only maintained my prestige by my ability to suddenly seize upon and throw down the boy nearest by. This was something of which she might only make a dream.

All of this showing off and the confidence in my own powers fully convinced me how much superior was man to woman. All she could do was to look on—at least so far as I knew—with an occasional attempt at being something, by a sudden and unexpected getting of my tag. This I frequently treated with contempt. Once in a while I risked my reputation for being manly by running pell-mell after her until the tag was successfully recovered.... And yet I was to be humiliated by this red-headed jade.

Jean François had caused consternation by announcing that within a few days he must be off for the white highways. Already he had remained too long in one place. However much he might love us, he could not afford to let his liver atrophy. Besides, were they not waiting for their happy pedler in another far-off gracious land?... "They await my pack," said he restlessly, "for fine knacks for ladies—pins, points, laces, gloves, and the thousand flimsy, silky things they adore!" And he bowed with a smile full of splendid mockery.... Our hearts were sad. Did we not want him forever?

The story of my humiliation comes here.... You will remember how we used to have to memorize long verses and recite them from the platform on Friday afternoons before visitors and the high and mighty school committee? It was upon such an auspicious occasion. Your speech—I am sure of the terminology—was, "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying." Mine, with swimming gestures and trembling voice, was "Bingen, Fair Bingen on the Rhine." Who, dear friends, could think of greater recitations than these? Were they not time-honored? Were they not a part of the tradition of Oldmeadow? Certainly, I answer.

Now Jean François had been prevailed upon to enter for at least one hour beneath a roof. The pedler had serious objections to hats, which he never wore, and houses, which he rarely entered. Yet, out of compassion because of his leaving us, he had come to hear our speech-making. He sat with uneasy grace upon a front bench by Doctor Longstreet, who found much to amuse him in the umbrella man's discomfort.... It was when Nance stood before us, scared white, with tears beneath just the surface of her restless eyes, that Jean François lost his self-consciousness. Mr. Finus Appleblossom, proprietor of the store, chairman of the board, prominent in lodge and church circles, cleared his august throat ostentatiously and swelled with importance. Something seemed to be in the atmosphere.... Then in a very pretty little voice, which at once gained confidence, Nance began a song. Didn't I know it? Certainly, I assert. Had I not heard Jean François sing it a hundred times, but who, save the jade, would have ever thought of toppling custom, tradition, and the school board by singing a song—a very short one at that—Friday afternoon? And such a song!

This was the song of the jade:

"Lawn as white as driven snow;
Cypress black as e'er was crow;
Gloves as sweet as damask roses;
Masks for faces, and for noses;
Bugle-bracelets, necklace amber;
Perfume for a lady's chamber;
Golden quoifs and stomachers,
For my lads to give their dears;
Pins and poking-sticks of steel,
What maids lack from head to heel:
Come, buy of me, come; come, buy, come, buy;
Buy, lads, or else your lasses cry:
Come, buy."

For a moment after she had concluded she stood as if dumb, half-frightened, heart-sick, and then, bursting into tears, with a stifled little cry of despair, she rushed and fell all in a heap at the knees of Jean François. Forgetting all of us, he picked her up in his big, strong arms—she who was but a fragile child—and, smoothing the rumpled hair from her eyes, kissed her brow.

"Dear little jade," said he quite tenderly, "I didn't know that it made all of this difference."

"You won't go, Jean François?" she smiled through her tears.

"I must," said he regretfully. "I cannot help it.... But next June I'll come again. And every June that follows, as long as I shall live, the happy caravan shall be yours."

A few moments later, as we hurried into the open, I noticed that Nance was actually growing. It had never occurred to me that she would ever be any larger than the day she first thrust herself through my crack in the fence. As she passed with her grandfather, Jean François, and Mr. Appleblossom, she nodded to me quite as if she were an equal. In my humiliation I quite forgot to walk on my hands, a feat I was holding in reserve. Instead, off I skipped down to the river and "went-in" by myself. I felt that the world was very unappreciative and unsympathetic.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A PEDLER'S PACK OF DREAMS

"Jean François," Nance was pleased to say very earnestly, "the river and the hills have belonged to us for so very long—I wonder when we will own the old-fashioned home of the many pillars?"... Because of his talking so frequently about it, we had grown to accept as a settled thing the possibility of our one day possessing the house of our heart's desire.

Columbine stood securely packed, the pedler was shod with newly soled boots, the road lay wistfully before him. It was the last beautiful night of our summer. In the early morning, Jean François, mender of umbrellas, would be off, and, for us, the winter. Yet it was not an unhappy gathering beside the September camp-fire. No one might be unhappy with the master of the caravan.

We had cooked a genuine greenwood supper and eaten it in the twilight. There was bacon held over the embers on a sharpened stick, bread baked in the ashes on heated stones, eggs boiled in Jean François' great kettle, and coffee, black and strong. What else, pray you, could one have wished? Afterward, with the smoke of Pierrett curling about his head and filling the air with the aroma of burning tobacco, he sang for us. He told old tales of men-at-arms in France until our blood grew warm and with him we fought great battles. Sometimes he would speak of fairies, elves, and the people of the woods; or of ghostly visitors to winter firesides; of far-off roads in far-away lands where the fields were always in bloom and the sun always mellow, warm, and soft.... He then told us how houses had souls the same as men and hungered to be loved. It was at this time Nance asked her question about our possessions.

As I have said before, he had frequently talked of our one day possessing the old home, but never with the seriousness with which he now spoke. It was evident that this time he considered the matter with sincerity.

"So you would really like to grow up and live in the Abbé's house?" said he, answering his questioner by a question.

"It would be the most beautiful thing in the world," was her reply. After a moment's hesitation, as if doubtful of what she should say, she added:

"That is, if—if you would come and live with us, Jean François."

"Thank you, my dear," he replied, with a singular note of tenderness in his voice. "Thank you very much indeed, but that would be impossible. Quite as impossible as your becoming a gipsy. And what would become of Columbine, Rogue, and Pierrett without the dingle and le long trimard? No, that would never do!... But, as for the other, why not?

"Why not, my girl?" was his comment, this time addressed to Pierrett. His rather queer custom of consulting the little briar-root pipe as if it were a conscious being was something to which we had long become accustomed. It was his way of talking things over with himself. In the same manner he held one-sided discussions with Columbine and Rogue. He was not partial in his family, though I feel sure the shaggy, sure-footed little mare was valued most highly.

"Why not?" he continued. "Monsieur l'Abbé, whom I know full well, illy deserves the home.... He is doing nothing worthy of enjoying such a charming house, is he? Eh?... Monsieur Jacques, where are your poor? Your shabby little brothers of the Parisian street? Where are the pinched hungry mouths with whom you once shared your crusts?... Ah, those were the days of crusts!... Where is the little attic in la Rue St. Jacques?... Let me see, children, is this not what He said to him each night:

"'For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.'

"Now, Monsieur Picot, the voices are far away. You live in an alien land. Your pleasures, instead of boldly as of old, you take surreptitiously.... One day, you poor renegade, you will die and pass to the only heaven I know of—the long roads and sunlit fields of Picardy.... You haven't an heir by blood in the world. Why not an heir by love? Eh, Pierrett? I knew that you would say, 'Yes.'... I'll suggest it to the old curmudgeon."

"My dears," said he, addressing us, "I know this Monsieur l'Abbé very well. Some day I shall pay him a call and suggest how generous a thing it would be if he were to make his will in your favor. Then, quietly, with exceeding propriety, so as not to offend any member of your family, pass unto his fathers.... I will say, 'Monsieur, He says that "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my—"'"

"Dear Jean François," interrupted Nance, a bit horrified, "how disrespectfully you can talk!... I, too, know Monsieur l'Abbé—"

"But I know him much better than you, Nance." And he held his hand for her to be silent.

"I think to-night," said he a moment later, "I shall conclude by telling you the story of Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot, of the little Rue St. Jacques, Paris."

CHAPTER EIGHT

MONSIEUR L'ABBÉ PICOT OF THE BRAVE OUTLANDISH HEART

Monsieur l'Abbé Picot, in whose heart there dwelt a queer mixture out of which to make a priest, was talking with a letter, written in a strange foreign hand, as it lay upon his knee. The entire morning had been spent at the beloved task of writing a sonnet. The afternoon, in the most miserable part of Paris, he might have been found visiting the homes of his sick and his poor, to whose ills, of body and of spirit, he deemed himself physician. In the evening for an hour he saw that happy laughing première danseuse, Mademoiselle Andree, at the gay little theater near the corner, pirouetting care from the heavy souls of men. In the early night he had but recently ceased to read the book which still lay open on the floor at his side, and for uncounted joyous moments had fancied himself strutting the streets in the company of the brave D'Artagnan, their swords clanking in their scabbards, their eyes fierce for adventure.

It was thus, upon a day, that his warm love of life would come calling him for the army. At the very thought of men-at-arms his slender nostrils would widen and his imagination sniff the pungent odor of burning powder. There was no doubt in his mind that among his ancestors there had been some great warrior whose passion for fighting was but tempered by his patriotism. And his heroes, were they not Porthos, La Fayette, D'Artagnan, Washington, and Napoleon? Could he have been born to please his own choice of time, other than to have been the captain of the Guards during the reign of Louis XIV—the Louis of his own Dumas, the magnificent—he would have chosen to have fought under the Emperor. Then those escapades of student life at Harcourt! He scarcely dared to dream of such old brave days, now the well-beloved secrets hidden beneath a cassock and a cowl. They were stored in a memory made all the more sacred by the thought that such adventurous hours dare never be lived again. Then he feared for his impulsive nature. His mind, cooled and brought to the level of every day's simple duty, knew what was his actual and true work in the world. But O, the mischief of his wandering fingers, of his heart when the virile passion of life played riot in his veins. So it was, at times he seemed to know that to lead the battle, to cry for France, to spill one's blood for kings, that, indeed, was to be a man.

Yet when the wild airs of the early springtime came caressing the winter's fields and forcing from their barren and frosty breasts the first of the gladsome flowers, the passion in his veins turned merciful. The snows he did not love; for beneath the beauty and the softness of the drifting flakes he saw the treachery of the cold—the cold that brought but misery to his poor and made them almost forget that ever again God would bring the summer-time days. But when the earth lived again and became a mother with a thousand wombs, giving birth each beautiful moment to every green and blossoming thing; when he turned his eyes, made world-weary by looking on the suffering his people needs must bear, unto the blue of the warm skies, where it seemed that the very heavens were renewing, with some mysterious pigments, their blue and the white clouds afloat therein; and women went about with a strange new faith on their brows, while their men grew strong again with hope and courage, it was then that the thoughts of the Abbé Picot wandered to the gentler play of happy children, while his fingers, made kind through a mood quickened by nature, wrought new dreams into song. A poet! Ah, he told himself, was there anything better than to be a maker of dreams? Was the good God ever more gracious than when he gave to one's mind to see and appreciate everything beautiful in a world within which there was so much of ugliness? Aye, on occasions even to find the very hideousness of things containing some inner, secret loveliness for the souls of men? Then, withal, to bless the hand with the art of expressing the things seen of his heart so others, reading in passing, might know His wonders too, was of a surety to be markedly favored of destiny. Thus it was that our good Abbé made sonnets and madrigals with his master Pierre Ronsard, ballades after the manner of that charming rogue François Villon, and songs quite as exquisite as those of the amorous troubadour, Bernard de Ventadour, whom he admired more for the structure of his verses than the sentiment expressed therein.

Probably most of all the Abbé Picot loved the earlier night hours, when, in fancy, his priestly robes laid aside, he seemed to forget his chivalry, his strength of arm, and the tenderness of his hands and live merely to absorb himself in the superficial lives of the men and women passing in the streets. The garish lights of theaters, cafés, and the great salons, the thoroughfares congested with carriages, and bewildered people hastened by fear and the threatening gendarme; the hurried, half-confused movements of belated shoppers, the roaming groups of pleasure-seekers, all found him thinking himself as Pierrot with his Pierrett, the gayest of the revelers. Frequently he would take his stand within an unused doorway and look with curious kindly interest into every face that passed. The pretty chattering grisettes; the swaggering soldier with his impudent leer; the wealthy, from quarters distinguished for their aristocratic dwellers, out to dabble in questionable joys; the vagabond stopping, meanwhile munching his miserable crust, to gaze into the richness of a shop-window at the clothing he might never hope to wear; the gamin, happy, ignorant, old at ten years, and appallingly wise in the ways of crime and despairing poverty; a thief with furtive look, shifting eyes, and hands whose searching fingers curved like the claws of a bird of prey; a courtesan irresponsibly, artificially gay in her rented finery; a priest hurrying to shrive some woful dying player on the boards of existence; a palsied old man tottering on the very edge of his finished days; a gladsome pink-cheeked youth, buoyed by the hope and courage born of inexperience, with his years all unfulfilled; a sick child crying in its mother's impotent arms; birth, death, and all that passes between found a very human interest in the mind, with a prayer in the heart of Monsieur l'Abbé, who now deemed it his particular business in life to be a maker of joys. He knew that none of them were all bad. The most of them were peculiarly generous and often good. His heart told him that a knowledge of life was a far, far better equipment for the soul's physician than a course in theology. To help his men and women, he argued, he must know them, not only in their more potent wrongs and uglier misdeeds, but in their pleasing sins, their follies, the gaiety belonging to the idle, lighter part of their being. And because there was in his own nature a subdued impulse which, uncontrolled, would have led him into many of their venial intemperances, he had a confidence in them wrought of an understanding mind and a sympathetic heart. So this watcher by the side of the road loved the night and all of her mysterious, alluring children. In his fancy he followed in and out of their varied lives until his soul became a part of those to whom he deemed it the biggest thing in the world to bring joy.

After such a night, again in his home with the day's work and play ended, kneeling beside his lonely little bed beneath the crucifix, the sorrow, the shame, the pain, the misery caused by all of life seemed to surge through his veins like a tempestuous sea overwhelming all before it. Quickly crossing himself, sighing while gently shaking his head, he would once again become the good Abbé Jacques Picot. He was, so to speak, a religious free-lance; a priest without benefice, whose relations with the authority of the Church were scarcely evident—a condition somewhat prevalent in France. Yet, unlike many of his brother clerics, he believed his parish to consist of humanity at large.

"Wherever a heart is broken, a soul is sick, or a body suffering," he is known to have said, "it is there I have a work to do. Patria est ubicumque est bene. So my task is wherever joy may be made."

Yet withal, at heart and in temperament he was a loyal Parisian.

Just how long the Abbé's meditations had been going on from the moment he had ceased to read until the concièrge, after knocking upon the door, slipped in and laid a letter upon his lap, it would be difficult to calculate. Whatever that may have been, for much longer did he read, reread, and study the missive before him. Finally he raised his good gray eyes, filled with a sort of an amazing despair, and cried aloud:

"Jacques, Jacques, thou art indeed sore beset. To be one man is of course to be none at all; to be two is the average lot of the more fortunate; but to be no less than five, by all the saints in paradise, is to be worse off than that angel whose right wing was born of heaven and the left of hell!"

"What is it, my brother?" one of the men within him seemed quietly to ask. In fact, the wee, small voice appeared so actual that the good Abbé was startled.

By way of reply, for the hundredth time he read the letter.... It was from a Doctor Felix Longstreet of Oldmeadow, Kentucky, United States of America, announcing an inheritance—that is, with conditions. To him it meant wealth.

"Shall you go?" now inquired the quiet man uneasily.

"It is a green, grassy old name for a town," was the rather irrelevant reply.

"Do you wish to go?" again came the inquiry from the same anxious source.

"Kentucky!" he pronounced with not unbeautiful accents. "Kentucky sounds like poetry for 'out of doors.'"

"What will you do?" insisted several of the little men within at once.

"Things will be different there," argued the Abbé. "It is an old Protestant community. So said the letter.... You will not be in unconventional Rue St. Jacques. You cannot have liberties." He advanced a hundred objections, yet scarcely believing in any of them.

"But I may study," he continued. "I scarcely have an opportunity here. And my beloved philosophy shall have more time. I might even write my memoirs.... You know," in a tone of apology to the quiet one, "every Frenchman who can hold a pen wants to write memoirs.... Besides, cannot I make the people good Catholics?" This he said for conscience's sake.

"That, you know when you say it, would be next to impossible," came the prompt objection.

"I can try very hard, very gently."

"Certainly! It will ease your conscience for accepting quiet, well-ordered years of ease away from the problems of life."

"O, thou tender friend, you are brutally frank.... You help me make up my mind.... I shall go to this land of Kentucky."

"Do.... 'Au revoir, my happy, sunny France,' you shall say, but many's the time your poor heart shall break for her freedom, the merry, care-free streets of Paris, and the road to Amiens we have traveled so often together."

"Very likely.... I think I shall go," came from the Abbé.

"Are you certain?" again insisted the quiet one, with a note of suspicious eagerness illy suppressed.

The Abbé looked about him, before replying, as if sensing something wrong. "I am absolutely sure!" he said a trifle vehemently.

"I am glad," chuckled the quiet one good humoredly. "I wanted to go myself."

It was thus, after much debating with himself, that Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot came to live in the old-fashioned home of the many pillars.

CHAPTER NINE

THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN

Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot, in the old home of many pillars, sat in the library at his desk writing his memoirs. He was dressed with unusual neatness in the garb of a French priest. His closely cropped hair showed a well-shaped head, while his face, freshly shaven, presented strikingly interesting features. His mouth was big and amiable, his lips full yet firmly set, his nose almost too large, and his prominent lower jaw bespoke a strong will. It was a pair of humorous gray eyes, twinkling in irrepressible goodwill, that lighted and relieved a countenance which otherwise might have appeared unduly severe.... Can you imagine the disciple Peter with the eyes of Rabelais? Had he been a saint he would have been Francis of Assisi.

The room in which he wrote was filled with books and manuscripts. The library, upon closer inspection, would have shown that it was largely given to general literature. Subjects upon theology were conspicuously absent. The tastes of the owner were evidenced by the volumes upon the table. Poems by Ronsard; Rabelais' "Les Faits et Dicts Heroisques du Bon Pantegruel," "Twelfth Night" by Shakespeare, and "The Life and Adventures of Guzman d'Alfarache" by Mateo Aleman.

As he wrote in a memorandum evidently intended for amplification later, then to be placed in the memoirs, he smiled as if taking a whimsical joy in what he recorded.

This is what Monsieur l'Abbé wrote:

On the afternoon of September 14, as I took my first walk upon my return home, I watched, quite unobserved by me, a tow-headed, freckle-faced boy, just reaching the Dumas stage of his charmed life, wade through the hot limestone dust of the turnpike, which forms Oldmeadow's chief street, and, upon reaching the spring just without the town, stand and cool his feet in the water of which he had drunk but a moment before. Even to this day I never see a small boy but what, if the opportunity presents itself, I look to see if he is web-footed. If certain illustrious warriors of an age when there never appeared to have been any real boys may be said to have been, like Romulus, suckled by a she-wolf, so it seems most of the youths I know must have been turned out by their mothers to be reared by the ducks. At any rate I know what an instinct all normal, healthy boys have for puddles.

Now I think I have a very acute intuition about boys and their thoughts. This time it was not different. This self-conscious boy was saying good-by to the very little boy, more than half baby, that he had been ever since he could remember. Previously he had been just a child, without sex-consciousness. All of the fluffy little girls were merely a part of the landscape. A part, at that, whose existence to him, so far as their being of any use, was a mystery. To him they were as superficial in their importance as the mice from which they ran in horror, or the abominable cats which they chose to pet. He had always proved sufficient unto his little self, and there was really no one whom he felt that he could really do without, unless it be mother, father, and the river. Recognizing his superior physical strength when compared with that of girls, and measuring all things by this prowess, his inability to place them in their proper relationship to life increased with each new feat. There was where his world lay, and girls were forbidden. It is true Nance Gwyn possessed some recommendatory qualifications, yet her frequent readiness to tears kept her without the pale.

Finally it was this same Nance who burst his world like a bubble and sent him forth upon a quest which would occupy him for the remainder of his life. Within the past year there had softly and unwittingly crept upon him a knowledge of her necessity to his well-being. He now saw in a measure her place in the whole. She was now in the ascendancy, and he knew in his boyish heart that she always would be. And while he never doubted it being worth it, he was sure that he had paid a great price. He had given something that, however much he longed to retain it, he might never hope to have again. He had given his very little boyhood with its irresponsible innocence born of this same lack of any appreciation of sex. For this tenderness that had brought him to know and feel the thrill of a thousand sweet mysteries in the now glorious Nance he had given up the circus days, the joy in a dirty face, the fun of hearing her squeal in response to his torments, and from a sort of undesirable, weak boykin, in a fluff of little skirts, whose only redeeming quality was a vain attempt to be like "the fellows," she became of a sudden a woman-child with all the alluring and delightful charms of girlhood.

It is only fair to say that had the boy been asked to choose between the two, he would have unhesitatingly taken the life he knew lay all before him, unlived, unfulfilled, full of mystery, hope and Her. Yet it was no disloyalty, no cowardice to spend a day in getting used to the new by dwelling in tender memory over the old.

So he stretched himself under a hillside tree, and held his head in his hands with fingers interlaced beneath. His bare knees were crossed with one wet muddy foot propped in the air, while the other found a hold in the moss at the roots of his shelter. His eyes wandered through the green cool leaves above him and noted the wonderful blue of the sky where the white clouds sailed like great, snow-sheeted ships in a sea of turquoise. They seemed very beautiful, very kind, very prophetic of the joy of the long, long days to be. Everything now seemed different. It was the same colorful late summer heaven of a year ago, it was true, but to it there had been added a new, more vital meaning. The blue was the same as that of her eyes and the clouds spelled her name.

It seemed that before he had never discovered that there were so many girls in the world. Everywhere there was nothing but bright eyes in lovely fresh faces, always beaming in friendly innocence upon him. He had scarcely noticed them before. Now they lent a subtle joy, an alluring mystery to everything with which they were associated. A bit of ribbon, a piece of lace, was no longer a portion of silk or so much linen.

For him, of a surety, God had created "a new heaven and a new earth." Forgotten was the ancient story of Eve and the garden. Now Nance, of the sun-colored hair, was the first woman. And as he lay in a fine sensuous health beneath the sky, which brought to him the deep color of her eyes, it seemed that a voice, calling him from somewhere within the mighty distance, named him Adam. It unnerved and startled him. Turning upon his face he burst into tears. His small shoulders shook convulsively, and for the first time he sobbed as does a man. As his body heaved with the pain of his unaccountable sorrow, a top with a soiled string fell from his pocket, and, rolling down the hill, lay neglected in the mud; a bird in the tree-top above broke the stillness of the afternoon with a full-throated, joyous song to his mate; a great white cloud, passing over the sun, cast a soft running shadow across the valley to the ridges; all nature seemed to sigh, like a sleeping child, or was it the oaten pipes of Pan, and then to awaken into new life.

It was the same colorful late summer heaven of a year ago it was true, but to it there had been added a new, more vital meaning. The blue was the same as that of her eyes and the clouds spelled her name.

The Boy ceased his sobbing. After a while, looking up with a tearful, smiling face, he announced, as if to the Voice that had called him:

"Now I must go to work."

The boy ceased his sobbing. After a while, looking up with a tearful, smiling face, he announced, as if to the voice that had called him:

"Now I must go to work."

PART SECOND

Ten Years Later

O master, if you did but hear the pedler at the door, you would never dance again after a tabor and a pipe; no, the bagpipe could not move you: he sings several tunes faster than you'll tell money; he utters them as he had eaten ballads and all men's ears grew to his tunes.

—A Winter's Tale.