BEHIND the ranges of the sand hills, lie stretches of broken waste country. It is diversified with patches of woods, tangled thickets, swamps, little ponds, stagnant pools covered with green microscopic vegetation, and small areas of productive soil. There are long, low elevations, covered sparsely with gnarled pines, spruces, poplars, and sumacs. Tall elms, many willows, and an occasional silvery barked sycamore, lend variety to the scene.

Here and there, just back of the big hills, are deep secluded tarns, which have no visible outlets or inlets. One looks cautiously down from the surrounding edges. In the obscurity of the deep shadows there is tangled dead vegetation, a few decayed tree-trunks, and an uncanny stillness. Unseen stagnant water is there, and the mysterious depths seem to be without life. They are fit abodes for gnomes, and evil spirits may haunt their silences. There is an instinctive creepy feeling, and an undefined dread in the atmosphere around them.

Swamps of tamarack, which are impenetrable, contribute their masses of deep green to the charm of the landscape. The ravagers of the wet places hide in them, and the timid, hunted wild life finds refuge in their still labyrinths. In the winter countless tracks and trails on the snow lead into them and are lost.

Among the most interesting of the marsh dwellers is the muskrat. This active little animal is an ever-present element in the life of the sloughs, and he is the most industrious live thing in the back country. His numerous families thrive and increase, in spite of vigilant enemies that besiege them. The larger owls, the foxes, minks, and steel traps are their principal foes.

The houses, irregular in shape and size, dot the surfaces of the ponds and swamps. They are built of lumps of sod and mud, mixed with bulrushes and heavy grass. They usually contain two rooms, one above the other, and little tunnels lead out from them, under ground, providing channels of escape in case of danger, and safe routes of approach to the houses from the burrows in the higher ground along the banks.

The upper cavity of the little adobe structure is usually lined with moss and fine grass. Lily roots, freshwater clams, and other food are carried up into it from under the ice in the winter. In these cosy retreats the little colonies live during the cold months, oblivious to the cares and dangers of the outside world.

There is a network of thoroughfares and burrows in the soft earth among the roots of the willows on the neighboring banks. The devious secret passages and runways are in constant use during the summer.

The muskrats are great travelers, and roam over the meadows, through the ravines, up and down the creeks, and around on the sand hills, in search of food and adventure. They run along the lake shore at night, and their tracks are found all over the beach. Their well-beaten paths radiate in all directions from their homes. They are not entirely lovable, but the back country would be desolate indeed without them.

The herons stand solemnly, like sentinels, among the thick grasses, and out in the open places, watching for unwary frogs, minnows, and other small life with which nature has bountifully peopled the sloughs. The crows and hawks drop quickly behind clumps of weeds on deadly errands in the day time, and at night the owls, foxes, and minks haunt the margins of the wet places. The enemies of the Little Things are legion. Violent death is their destiny. With the exception of the turtles, they are all eaten by something larger and more powerful than themselves.

In the fall and early spring the wild ducks and geese drop into the ponds and marshes, and rest for days at a time, before resuming their migrations. They come in from over the lake during the storms to find shelter for the night, and are reluctant to leave the abundant food in these nooks behind the hills. A flat-bottomed boat among the bulrushes, and a few artificially arranged thick bunches of brush and long grass, which have been used as shooting blinds, usually explain why they have not stayed longer.

A few of the ducks remain during the summer, build their nests on secluded boggy spots, and rear their young; but the minks, snapping turtles, and other enemies besides man, generally see that few of them live to fly away in the fall.

Occasionally a small weather-beaten frame house, and a tumble-down old barn, project their gables into the landscape. Around them is usually a piece of cleared land that represents years of toil and combat with the reluctant soil, obstinate stumps, and tough roots.

Nature has begrudgingly yielded a scanty livelihood to the brave and simple ones who have spent their youth and middle age in wresting away the barriers which have stood between them and the comforts of life. The broken-spirited animals that stand still, with lowered heads, in the little fields and around the barn, are mute testimonies of the years of drudgery and hardship.

On approaching the house we encounter a few ducks that splash into the ditch along the muddy road, and disappear in great trepidation among the weeds and bulrushes beyond the fence. The loud barking of a mongrel dog is heard, a lot of chickens scatter, and several children with touseled heads and frightened faces appear. Behind them a lean-faced woman in a faded calico dress looks out with a reserved and kindly welcome. The dog is rebuked sharply, and finally quieted. The scared children hastily retreat into the house, and peek out through the curtained windows. We explain that we came to ask for a drink of water. The woman disappears for a moment, brings a cup, and some rain water in a broken pitcher, with which to prime the pump in the yard.

This wheezy piece of hardware, after much teasing, and encouragement from the broken pitcher, finally yields, and one object of the visit is accomplished. The children begin cautiously to reappear, their curiosity having got the better of their alarm.

A few commonplace remarks about the weather, a complimentary reference to a flower bed near the fence, an inquiry as to the ages of the children, soon establish a friendly footing, and we are asked to sit down on the bench near the pump and rest awhile.

“Don’t you sometimes feel lonely out here, with no neighbors?” I asked. “No, indeed,” she replied. “We’ve got all the neighbors we want. Nobody lives very near here, but there isn’t a day passes that I don’t see somebody drivin’ by out on the road. I ride to town every two or three weeks, an’ that’s enough for anybody.”

A man of perhaps forty, but who looks to be fifty, rather tall and spare, with bent shoulders and shambling step, appears after a few minutes. His shaved upper lip and long chin whiskers strictly conform to the established customs of the back country.

It is a land of the chin whiskers, and they are met with everywhere in the by-paths of civilization. Their picturesque quality is the delight of him who uses the lead pencil and pen to portray the oddities of his race.

He has come from over near the edge of the timber, where he has been repairing a decayed rail fence. His greeting is kindly, and we are made to feel quite at home. Some fresh buttermilk from an old-fashioned churn near the back door adds to the pleasant hospitality, and the loud cackling of a proud and energetic rooster, adorned with brilliant plumage, who takes credit for the warm egg which a dignified old hen has just left in the corner of the corn crib, lends an air of cheerfulness and animation to the scene. He has just learned of the achievement, and the glory is his.

Out in the yard is a covered box with a circular hole in its front. A small chain leads into it, which is attached to the outside by a staple. After a few minutes the furtive wild eyes of a captive coon peer out fearfully from the inner darkness of the box. He was extracted from the cosy interior of a hollow tree, over near the edge of the swamp, during his infancy, and was the sole survivor of a moonlight attack on his home tree, after the dogs had located the happy family. The tree was cut down, the little furry things mangled by savage teeth, and their house made desolate. The little fellow was carried into a hopeless captivity, where his days and nights are passed in terror. He is a prisoner and not a pet.

It is mankind that does these things—not the brutes—and yet we cry out in denunciation when humanity is thus outraged. We chain and cage the wild things, and shriek for freedom of thought and action. Verily this is a strange world!

I talked with one of the little girls about the coon. She told me his story and said they called him “Tip.” My heart went out to him, and I longed to take him under my coat, carry him into the deep woods, and bid him God speed. He probably would have bitten me had I attempted it, but in this he would have been justified from his point of view, for he had never had a chance in his despoiled life to learn that there could be sympathy in a human touch. In this poor Tip is not alone in the world.

Time slumbers in the back country. The weekly paper is the only printed source of news from the outside, and, with the addition of a monthly farm magazine, with its woman’s department, constitutes the literature of the home. These periodicals are read by the light of the big kerosene lamp on the table in the middle of the room, and the facts and opinions found in them become gospel.

The country village is perhaps a couple of miles farther inland. There is a water-mill on the little river, and bags of wheat and corn are taken to it to be ground. The miller—sleepy-eyed and white—comes out and helps to unload the incoming grain, or deposit the flour or meal in the back part of the wagon.

The general store and post-office is on the main road, near the mill. The proprietor is the oracle of the community, and a fountain of wit and wisdom. The store is the clearing-house for the news and gossip of the passing days.

A weather-beaten sign across the front of the building reads, “The Center of the World.” The owner declares that “this must be so, fer the edges of it are just the same distance off from the store, no matter which way ye look.”

There is much unconscious philosophy in the quaintly humorous sign, for, after all, how little we realize the immensity of the material and intellectual world that is beyond our own horizon. The homely wit touches incisively one of the foibles of human kind.

Elihu Baxter Brown, the storekeeper, is well

along in years. He is tall, somewhat stoop-shouldered, and his eyes look quizzically out of narrow slits. His heavy gray mustache dominates his face, the cumbersome ornament suggesting a pair of frayed lambrequins. He lives in a little old-fashioned house that sets back in a yard next his store. A quiet gray-haired woman, with a kindly face, sits sewing in the shade near the back door. They walked to the home of the minister fifteen miles away, to be married, over fifty years ago. They trudged back in the afternoon and began their lives together in the humble frame house that now shows the touch of decay and the scars of winter storms.

The small trees that they planted around it have grown tall enough almost to hide the quiet home among their shadows. Little patches of sunlight that have stolen through the leaves are scattered over the roof on bright days, like happy hours in solemn lives.

In a sealed glass jar on a “what-not” in a corner of the front room is a hard queer-looking lump, encrusted with dry mold, a fragment of the wedding cake of half a century ago, which has been faithfully kept and cherished through the years. To the world outside it is meaningless; here it is sacred.

The little things to which sentiment can cling are the anchorages of our hearts. They keep us from drifting too far away, and they call to us when we have wandered. The small piece of wedding cake—gray like the heads of those who reverence it—has helped to prolong the echoes of the chimes of years ago. It was a rough gnarled hand which carefully put the glass jar back into its place after it was shown, but it was a tender and beautiful thought that kept it there.

The old man is now seventy-six. He says that sometimes he is only about thirty, and at other times he is over a hundred—it all depends on the weather and the condition of his rheumatism.

“When I git up in the mornin’,” said he, “I first find out how my rheumatism is, then I take a look at the weather, an’ figger out what kind of a day it’s goin’ to be. If it’s goin’ to rain I let ’er rain, an’ if it ain’t, all well an’ good. Business is pretty slow when it rains, an’ when its ten or fifteen below in the winter, they ain’t no business at all. When it gits like that I hole up like a woodchuck, an’ set in the back part o’ the store in my high-chair, an’ make poetry an’ read. I don’t like to do too much readin’, fer readin’ rots the mind, an’ I’d rather be waitin’ on people comin’ in. Most gen’rally a lot o’ the old cods that live ’round ’ere drop in an’ we talk things over.

“This rheumatism o’ mine is a queer thing. I’ll tell ye sumpen confidential. You prob’ly won’t believe it, an’ I wouldn’t want what I say to git out ’cause its so improb’le, an’ it might hurt my credit, but I’ve bin cured o’ my rheumatism twice by carryin’ a petrified potato in my pocket. An old friend of mine, Catfish John’s got it now, an’ I don’t want to take it away from ’im as long as it’s helpin’ ’im, but when ’e gits through with it, I’m goin’ to have it back on the job, an’ you bet I’ll be hoppin’ ’round ’ere as lively as a cricket. The potato ’ll prob’ly be ’ere next week. I’ve had it fer ten years, an’ it beats everything I’ve ever tried.”

I asked the old man to allow me to see some of the poetry he had “made,” and thereby opened up a literary mine. The request touched a tender chord and I was ushered back to a worn desk of antique pattern in the rear of the store. He raised the lid and extracted the treasure. A book had been removed from its binding, and the covers converted into a portfolio. He gently removed about a hundred sheets of paper of various shapes and sizes, covered with closely written matter. Some of the spelling would have shocked the shade of Lindley Murray, and made it glad that he had passed away, and some of it would have made a champion of spelling reform quite happy. It was vers libre of the most malignant type. Rhymes were freely distributed at picturesque random, and while the ideas, rhythm, and meter were quite lame at times, much of the verse was better than some recently published imagist poetry, which contains none of these things. Humor and pathos were intermingled. Sometimes there was much humor where pathos was intended, and often real pathos lurked among the lighter lines.

There are many singers who are never heard. Melodies in impenetrable forests and trills that float on desert air are for those who sing, and not for those who listen. A happy soul may pour forth impassioned song in solitude, for the joy of the singing, and a solitary bard may distil his fancy upon pages that are for him alone.

The verse of Elihu Baxter Brown is its own and only excuse for being. It has solaced the still hours, and if its creator has been its only reader, he has been most appreciative.

A touching lay depicts his elation upon the departure of his wife “in a autobeel” on a long visit to distant relatives, but the joy prevails only during the first six lines. The remaining thirty are devoted to sorrow and “lonely misery as I walketh the street,” and end with “when will she be back I wonder?” He falls into a “reverree” and from under its gentle spell the virile lines, “The brite moon makes a strong impress on me,” and “I’ve named my pet hen after thee,” float into the world. With “eyes full of weep” he reflects that “sometimes she’s cold as all git out,” and further on he wishes that his “loved one was a pie,” so as to facilitate immediate and affectionate assimilation.

He bids the world to “go on with its music and kink it another note higher.” In later lines he naÏvely admits that “of all the poets I love myself the best.” Alas, he has much company! This effusion ends with “Gosh, I can’t finish this poetry till I pull myself together.”

War, love, spring, and beautiful snow flow through the limping measures. There are odes to the sun, the rain, and to his old bob-tailed gray cat, “Tobunkus,” who drowses peacefully on the counter near the scales.

The inspection of the poems led to the exhibition of his box of relics and curios, which he greatly valued. Among the carefully ticketed and labeled items, which we spread out on the counter, was a small chip from Libby Prison, a fragment of stone picked up near the National Capitol, a shark’s tooth, some Indian arrow-heads, an iron ring from a slave auction pen of ante-bellum days, a chip from the pilot house of a steamboat that was wrecked sixty years ago on the Atlantic coast, the dried stump of a cigar which had been given to him when he visited a Russian man-of-war in Boston harbor in 1859, and many other odds and ends that were of priceless value to him.

I picked up a small, round piece of wood, which he told me was the most remarkable and interesting relic of the whole lot. “That,” said he, “is a piece of the first shaving brush I ever shaved with”—a fact fully as important as most things, seemingly significant at present, will be a century hence. This wonderful object completed the exhibition, and the collection was carefully put away.

The interior of the store was rather gloomy, badly ventilated, and was pervaded with numberless and commingled odors. I could distinguish kerosene, dead tobacco-smoke, stale vegetables, damp dry-goods, and smoked herrings, but the rest of the indescribable medley of smells baffled analysis.

The stock of merchandise was varied, but there was very little of any one kind, except plug tobacco. Over a case containing several large boxes of this necessity of life in the back country was a strip of cardboard, on which was inscribed, “Don’t use the nasty stuff.” Under a wall-lamp was another placard, “This flue don’t smoke, neither should you.” Other examples of the proprietor’s wit were scattered along the edges of the shelves, and on the walls, and helped to impart an individual character to the place. Among them were, “Don’t be bashful. You can have anything you can pay for.” “This store is not run by a trust.” “No setting on the counter—this means you!” “Credit given only on Sundies, when the store is closed.” “Don’t talk about the war—it makes me sick.”

A large portion of the stock was in cans. Some of them had evidently been on the shelves for many years. There were cove oysters, sardines, and tinned meats of various kinds, with badly fly-specked labels. The old man remarked that “some o’ them air-tights has bin on hand since the early eighties.”

The humble tin can has been one of the important factors in the progress of the human race. With the theodolite, the sextant, and the rifle, it has been carried to the waste places of the earth, and because of it they have bloomed. Tin cans have lined the trails to unknown lands, and they have been left at both of the poles. The invader has flung them along his remorseless path when he has gone to murder quiet distant peoples whose religion differed from his own, and they have thus been made “instruments of the Lord’s mercy.” They lie on ghastly battlefields, mingled with splintered bones, where a civilization, of which we have boasted, has left them.

They are scattered over the bottom of the sea, float languidly in the currents of uncharted rivers, and rust on the sands of the deserts. They are hiding-places for tropical reptiles in tangled morasses, and prowling beasts sniff at them curiously in deserted camps along the outer rims of the world.

They symbolize the ingenuity of the white man, and in them has reposed the remains of every kind of fish, reptile, bird and beast that he has used for food. The aged bull, the scrawny family cow, the venerable rooster, the faithful superannuated hen, the senile billy goat, and other obsolete domestic animals, have found a temporary tomb within mysterious walls of tin, and have helped to feed others than those who canned them. They enclose fruit and vegetables that could not be sold fresh, and in them they go to the uttermost parts of the earth.

It was indeed strange destiny that took the sardine, flashing his bright sides in the blue Mediterranean, and left him immured on a musty shelf in a store in the back country. If he, with the contents of the cans around him, could return to life, there would be a motley company.

Perhaps, in quiet midnight hours, wraiths come out of the tins and play in the moonbeams that filter through the dusty windows. They may all have been there so long that social caste has been established. The fish, lobsters, cove oysters and clams, being sea people, probably hold aloof. This they may well do, as they are on the upper shelves.

The elderly domestic animals may have a dignified stratum of their own, in which the affairs of the old families can be discussed, while those who were feathered in life possibly form another pale group that devotes itself entirely to questions of personal adornment.

Behind the red labels on the lower shelves are the devilled ham and the pig’s feet. The goblins from these may hold high carnival in the silvery light—the frolics of the indigestibles—and their antics may last until the gray of the morning comes.

Nameless elfs may appear in the little throng. They are from the soups, and have so many component parts that they know not what they are. Naturally they may precede the others, but if they are in the ghostly circle, they are not of it.

Probably the specters from the canned hash are at the lower end of the scale.

I suggested to the old man that all these things might be happening while he slumbered, but he declared that I was mistaken. “There’s never bin any doin’s like that goin’ on ’round the store,” said he.

Figuratively, it might be said that many of us obtain most of our intellectual food from cans. The diet may be varied occasionally by fresh nutrients, but too often we rely upon products bearing established trade-marks for our mental sustenance. The rows of labels, honored by time and dimmed by dust, stand like tiers of skulls, with their eyeless caverns gravely still—mute symbols of the eternal hours—as if staring in dull mockery out of a vanished past. Living currents flow around us unheeded. We absorb predigested thought to repletion, and neglect vibrant mental forces, that through disuse become depleted, instead of enriching them with the study of the green and growing things that have not been put in cans.

“About ev’ry third year,” said the old man, “business gits worse’n ever, an’ that’s when a hoss trader named Than Gandy comes ’round. He lives some’rs in the eastern part o’ the state, an’ after ’e’s bin through ’ere ’e waits long enough fer most of ’em to fergit ’im before ’e comes agin. He starts out from where ’e lives with a sulky, an’ a crow bait hoss, an’ about five dollars. He spends a couple o’ months on ’is travels among the little places away from the railroads, an’ when ’e gits through with ’is trip, ’e has a string o’ seven er eight hosses, an’ four er five little wagons an’ buggies, an’ a lot o’ harnesses an’ whips an’ calves an’ sheep, an’ a big wad o’ money. He’s got all them things to boot in trades ’e keeps makin’. He beats ev’rybody ’e runs up ag’inst, an’ when ’e quits ’round ’ere nobody’s got any money left to buy things with. They don’t know what’s happened to ’em till ’e’s away off. When ’e stops at the store, he gen’rally trades me sumpen fer what ’e wants.

“Once Jedge Blossom traded hosses with ’im when ’e was piped, an’ gave ’im ten dollars to boot. He got a bum animal shifted on ’im, an’ when ’e sobered up, ’e sent Gandy a bill fer fifteen dollars fer legal advice, an’ the advice was not to come into this part o’ the country any more.”

The old man told me that he was born in a small town in Massachusetts.

“I was named after the preacher of our church. He was a great man an’ ’is eloquence was wonderful. His name was the Reverend Elihu Baxter, an’ ’e used to go up into the pulpit, an’ lean ’is stummick ’way out over it, an’ say, ‘Now you listen to me’!—an’ that’s the way ’e drawed ’em to ’im. When ’e’d first begin, the church ’ud be so still that you could hear the flies buzz, an’ ’is voice would sound all hollow, like ’e was talkin’ into a big dish-pan. We don’t have no more preachers like ’im now days, an’ people don’t go to church no more like they did then. We don’t have no more old-fashioned Sundays. There’s too many newspapers, an’ what they have to say takes the place o’ what we used to hear in the pulpit. What the preachers say now days ain’t interestin’ any more. People rest an’ play on Sunday now, instid o’ bein’ solemn an’ sad an’ settin’ ’round an’ listenin’ over an’ over to somebody tellin’ about them three fellers that was in the fiery furnace.”

He felt deeply his responsibility as a representative of the national government. The post-office department, with its rows of glass-fronted mail boxes, numbered from 1 to 40, was located at the right of the store entrance. The mail bag was brought daily from the railroad station, five miles away, by a fat-faced young man in blue overalls and a hickory shirt. His elbows flopped madly up and down as his horse galloped along the highway with the precious burden across the pommel. He made another trip at night with the out-going mail, and when the hoof-beats were heard on the road, there would be many glances at the clocks in the houses along his route, and the fact approvingly noted, that “Bill’s on time to-night, all right.”

There are many people in the world who win lasting laurels by being “on time.” Some do it quietly, and others by flopping their arms violently, to the accompaniment of resonant hoof-beats, as “Bill” does, but being “on time” is essential to success in life. “Bill” may have no other argument to present for his eventual redemption than the fact that he was always “on time,” but it cannot fail to be powerful and convincing.

“I would like this postmaster business,” said the old man, “if it wasn’t fer all the books I have to write in an’ the blanks I have to fill out. It keeps people comin’ in, but sometimes I have to set up pretty near all night writin’ out things fer the gov’ament. I don’t keep no books fer the store, fer I never sell nothin’ ’cept fer cash, or fer sumpen that’s brought in, an’ I keep my expense account in my hat. If the sheriff ever comes ’round ’ere to close me up, ’e won’t find no books to go by. I spend all the money that gits in the drawer, an’ if what’s in the store should burn up, I’d be ahead ’cause I’ve got insurance, an’ I’d git it all at once; so I guess I’m all right. I ain’t got much to show fer my life, ’cept a grin, but that’s sumpen. Some day I’ll have all the poetry I’ve made printed into a volume that’ll be put on sale, an’ I’ll have a reg’lar income an’ I won’t have to work no more.

“I’m keepin’ a first class place here. There’s a lot o’ this new-fangled stuff that I’ve stopped carryin’. People always buy it out when they come in, an’ I have to keep gittin’ more all the time. If I don’t have them things they ask fer, they’ll prob’ly buy sumpen that’s already on hand. I can’t please ev’rybody all the time, or I’d be worked to death. I don’t keep no likker, but anybody can git most anything else here that’ll make ’em smell like a man, an’ I don’t sell no cigarettes. A feller come in ’ere with one once, an’ when ’e went out ’e left ’is punk on the edge of a pile o’ paper. After a while some o’ the bunch out in front noticed some fire, an’ it pretty near burnt up the store, an’ besides they smell like a burnt offering, an’ I don’t like ’em.”

I asked him if he ever went over to the lake.

“Not fer about fifteen years. We all drove over there fer a bath, an’ I took a bad cold an’ I haven’t bin there since. This talk o’ washin’ all the time is nonsence. Jedge Blossom’s got a big tin bath tub up to his place, that’s painted green, an’ ’e gits in it an’ sloshes ’round ev’ry Saturday night when ’e’s home, but when Monday mornin’ comes ’e don’t look no better’n anybody else.”

During one afternoon that I spent with him in the rear of the store, he showed me some of the literature which he had taken down from the stock on one of the upper shelves, and had been reading during the winter. The pile consisted of old-fashioned dime novels of years ago, with their multicolored illustrated paper covers. Among the titles, and on the blood-curdling, well-thumbed pages, I found names that were once familiar and much beloved. “Lantern-Jawed Bob,” “Snake Eye,” “Deadwood Dick,” “Iron Hand,” “Navajo Bill,” “Shadow Bill,” “The Forest Avenger,” “Eagle-Eyed Zeke,” “The War Tiger of the Modocs,” “The Mountain Demon,” and many other forgotten heroes of boyhood days, “advanced coolly and stealthily” out of the mists of the dim past, and once more they scalped, robbed, trailed, circumvented bloodthirsty pursuers, had hair-breadth escapes, mocked death, rescued peerless maidens from savage redskins in the wilderness, and finally married them, as of yore.

The romance in the pile was irretrievably bad, but it recalled happy memories. It was not surprising that the old man was impressed with the idea that “too much readin’ rots the mind,” when spring came, and he had finished the stack.

Around the big stove, on chilly days, the owners of the chin whiskers congregate, with cob pipes and juicy plug. They contribute liberally to the square boxes filled with sawdust that serve as cuspidors. In this solemn circle the great political problems of the nation are considered and solved.

The gossip of the township is exchanged, and the personal frailties of absent ones discussed. The local Munchausen tells wondrous tales of his cow, that stands out in the river and is milked by hungry fish that wait among the lilies, and of hailstorms he has seen that have demolished brickyards.

A projected barn, the sale of a horse or cow, the repairs on a wagon, the prospects of frost or rain, the crops, the price of hogs, the tariff, the trusts, the rascality of the railroads, and many other subjects, are mingled with the gossip of the neighborhood. These matters are all deeply pondered over. They talk about their rheumatism, the “cricks” in their backs, their coughs, their aches and pains, and the foolish vagaries of the “women folks.” They buy patent medicines, and they bathe only when they get caught in the rain.

A slatternly looking woman comes in, buys some calico, thread, two yards of ribbon, and some hooks and eyes. When she departs some one remarks, “Wonder wot she’s goin’ to make now!” From that the conversation drifts to “the feller that left ’er about two years ago.” The proprietors of the chin whiskers all knew “when ’e fust come ’round, ’e wasn’t any good,” and the sage prophecies of by-gone days are now fully verified. The demerits of a certain horse, which he had once sold to one of the prophets, are again recounted, and the general opinion is that after the delinquent “got through with the lawsuit ’e was mixed up in, ’e went out west som’ers with the money ’is lawyer didn’t git. Anyhow, ’e was no good.” Nobody is “any good.”

When the time comes to “git home to supper,” the dilapidated vehicles begin to crawl out into the fading light and disappear. They carry the pessimists and the few necessaries which they have bought at the store—some molasses, sugar, tea and coffee, possibly a new shovel, some nails, and always a plentiful supply of plug tobacco, a great deal of which is filtered into the soil of the back country. Some eggs, butter, vegetables, and other produce of the little farm has been left in payment.

After the tired horses are unhitched and fed, the exciting gossip is retold at the supper table. A few chores are done, an hour or so is spent around the big lamp, and another eventful day has closed. A week may pass before another trip is made to the sleepy village.

Those who are gone are under the tall grasses and wild flowers on the hill near the woods, beyond the little weather-beaten country church. The iron bell has tolled for them as they were laid away, and now that it is all over, it is the same with them as if they had been monarchs or millionaires.

A touching, if crude, epitaph can be deciphered on one of the gray mossy stones through the crumbling fence. After the name and the final date are the lines,

and lower, under a pair of clasped hands, “We will meet again,” and it may be that a mighty truth is on the stone.