Glory lay over the whole college world.

The sun blazed upon an earth more beautiful than Peggy and Katherine ever remembered to have seen it. The woods, when the two took their walks, were as red with burnished leaves as if they had been on fire.

And a golden haze came in the morning and at sunset.

The mystery, the still power, and the vague melancholy of autumn, crept through the veins of the Hampton girls, and they walked and picnicked on Leeds rocks, and sang away the glorious afternoons far into the twilight, when the sudden coolness warned them of what they would forget—that these days were going, and that winter would soon be upon them.

Peggy and Katherine saw their first autumn at college dissolving in that golden haze almost before they had begun to enjoy it and to realize that all this was really theirs—this life among seventeen hundred girls, all young, all having identical interests, all happy and congenial.

There came a Saturday afternoon too lovely to be spent at home.

“What shall we do to-day, Katherine?” Peggy asked. “Let’s just go somewhere by ourselves. Do you want to drive, or walk, or have a bacon bat or take some books down by Paradise and read?”

A day like that one suggests many ways for enjoyment, but if there is one thing more absolutely satisfying than another, and just-the-thing-to-do on such a Saturday afternoon, it is to tramp over to the cider mill, with a jug and a capacity-appetite for new cider and ginger cookies.

So it was inevitable that Peggy and Katherine should decide on this as the ideal adventure, after they had exhausted all the possibilities.

“That cider mill seems just as much a part of the college as Seelye Hall,” laughed Katherine. “Peggy, can’t you taste that wonderful cider now? Let’s go right away,—I think we can walk over and back, don’t you?”

That would mean about a nine-mile jaunt.

Somebody in the house had a gallon jug, and the room-mates promptly and unceremoniously “borrowed” this and, with silk sweater coats, and a ribbon tied around their heads to keep their hair from blowing, started off into the wonder of Indian summer, their hearts full of joy over every one of the nine miles that lay before them.

The road was dusty, the jug was heavy, the day was hot. After two miles they were warm and thirsty—and hungry, too, and their feet dragged a little.

“Oh, that cider, that cider,” laughed Katherine. “I wish it could come part way to meet us!”

“Never mind, room-mate,” cheered Peggy, with mock heroism; “only a mile and a half to go now, and then the lovely cider will be running into our jug, and we can get several glassesful to drink there. And ginger cookies to your heart’s content, Kay.”

“Can’t we—speed up a little?” urged Katherine on the strength of that; “if we just double our steps, we’ll get there sooner.”

So the dust clouded up more thickly under their hastening footsteps, and the mile and a half dwindled and disappeared, until there before them was the cider mill itself, keeping guard over a little stream that gurgled into the mill and out again.

“At last, room-mate!” hailed Katherine.

“Katherine,” hesitated Peggy, right in sight of their goal, “have you—have you thought how much heavier the jug will be to carry back when it is full?”

Katherine cast at her one withering glance, seized her arm, and the two ran now, the jug bumping as it would against their knees, and the perspiration bright on their foreheads.

“It looks like a deserted castle,” panted Peggy when they turned up the worn pathway to the entrance of the mill. “And isn’t it quiet? Doesn’t it usually make some kind of noise?”

“You’re thinking of the planing mill, infant,” mocked Katherine.

“Well,—I—anyway, Katherine, the door is shut.”

“It won’t be hard to open,—why can’t you—?”

“Yes, I can open it,” Peggy answered, stepping into the entrance hall where the glasses of cider and the little packs of ginger cookies were usually sold, “but there’s no one here now that we’re in, and it looks more deserted than ever and there isn’t even a crumb of a ginger cooky—and I’m starved, nor a sip of cider—and I’m thirsty!”

“Why, this is Saturday, too. What do you suppose is wrong, Peggy? I’m absolutely dead, if I must confess it. I can’t possibly walk home without a cool drink of cider to brace me up. I never was so hungry and tired in my life.”

“That’s his house, I think,” Peggy nodded across the road toward a comfortable-looking farm house.

“Do you suppose the cider man would be home?”

“Anyway,” Peggy said faintly, “his wife would, and she might have some ginger cookies.”

They hurried down the walk and shuffled across the dusty road, feeling that if they were disappointed now they could scarcely bear it.

They went to the side door of the farm house and knocked timidly.

“Oh, Peggy, they’re eating!” gasped Katherine. “I feel like a tramp. I almost wish I was one, too, and then maybe they’d invite us in. But isn’t it a late time to be having dinner?”

The cider man’s wife stood in the doorway now, smiling at them somewhat impatiently.

“Did you come for cider?” she asked. “Well, about ten others have been here before you to-day, on the same errand, but he didn’t make any to-day. And there aren’t any ginger cookies. We didn’t have anything for the other girls, either. I never saw anybody like you college girls—a person feels guilty if he rests one day,—what with you all being hungry and thirsty just the same. I’m real sorry.”

“We—we brought a jug,” said Peggy pathetically.

“Brought a jug? Ernie!” (raising her voice, and calling back into the room where the table was). “They brought a jug.”

Ernie called back something, and a smile flitted across his wife’s face.

“He says if you want to wait till he’s through dinner, he’ll go over and make some,” she interpreted. “We’re very late getting dinner to-day—we’ve had so many interruptions. But if you want to wait———?”

“We’ll wait!” cried Peggy and Katherine in the same breath.

“It will be about an hour,” said the woman, closing the door.

“An hour!” Peggy and Katherine exchanged glances with deep sighs, and trudged down the steps, and slowly back toward the mill.

The cider mill was an important institution to Hampton girls—and to Amherst boys, if they cared to walk so far. The man who owned it seemed to feel an especial responsibility toward college girls—as every one does near a college town—and so he kept a counter in the entrance hall over which he sold as much cider as a girl wanted to drink, for five cents. One of his stalwart young helpers would fill her glass as many times as she wished, for the single first payment.

Then there were the ginger cookies, done up in oiled paper, in packages of a dozen, that his wife had made, and these the hungry young invaders could purchase at ten cents a package. They seemed so much a part of it all that cider never tastes quite perfect to Hampton graduates, to this day, without ginger cookies. Any of the Hampton girls would have been surprised to visit any other cider mill and find that their order for ginger cookies was not understood.

Opposite the mill, on the same side as the farmer’s house, but farther back, and screened all around by a circlet of trees, so that it sparkled in the midst of them like a Corot painting, was the cool mill-pond, with reeds and rushes growing out into it, and shady branches overhanging it.

Drawn toward this now in their search for something of interest to while away the time, Peggy and Katherine parted the bushes and young birch trees, and found themselves looking into the very heart of beautiful things, with all the world of dust and disappointment and fatigue behind them.

“That water looks cool,” murmured Peggy gladly.

“Yes; I don’t know as it’s safe drinking water, but I think we might wade in it.”

“If we have time.”

“An hour?—why of course there’s time. What else can we do to amuse ourselves?”

They were as entirely hidden from the road and the farm house as if they had been in another world. Without more argument, the two sat down and Katherine slipped out of her grey pumps, and flung her grey silk stockings after them. Peggy was wearing tan oxfords and tan stockings.

“O-oh, who would dream there could be anything so cold on such a warm day?” gasped Peggy, trying it with her toes.

“I like this reedy, weedy part,” laughed Katherine, her feet dipping in up to her ankles.

They sat, thus, side by side, dangling their feet like happy children, seeking to fathom with their eyes how soon the water got deep enough to drown them, should they step out farther, and watching idly the patterns made by the sea-weed strands near the shore.

“What if a fish should come?” cried Katherine suddenly, and laughed at the expedition with which Peggy’s feet came glistening up out of the water. “Don’t be silly, Peggy,” she giggled, “fish can’t bite anything but flies and worms.”

“Maybe the kind that would live in a mill-pond could,” said Peggy, comfortably sliding the reassured feet back into the still water. “And anyway, who wants to dispute habitation with a fish?”

With all manner of the gayest and most idiotic prattle they whiled away that endless hour, and if any one had stood just outside the fringe of little trees and had heard their voices without seeing them, he would never in the world have guessed that such inconsequential conversation was being indulged in by two freshmen in good standing of the largest woman’s college in America; girls who would be candidates for the degree within four years and who were even now in the process of being moulded into “intelligent gentlewomen.”

“Hasn’t that bird a funny whistle?” asked Katherine suddenly. “Listen! He whistles just like a person!”

And as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she was covered with confusion, for the realization came to her that it was a person,—somebody going by on the road, probably, and they had so far forgotten the world outside their own green hedge that it had startled them.

“I’m going to peek out,” said Peggy. Thrusting the leaves aside, she made a tiny opening,—large enough for her eyes to get a clear view of the road.

And then all of a sudden she sprang up, her face hot with excitement, and made as if to burst through the thicket to the road itself. She would have accomplished this had not Katherine caught her dress and dragged her back so violently that she sat down, breathless, on the bank of the pond, exclaiming over and over in gladness, “It’s Jim! Katherine, it’s Jim!”

“Your shoes and stockings, child,” urged Katherine. “Put them on, quick.”

But Peggy seized one grey and one tan stocking and on they went over her wet feet. Then she stepped into her tan oxfords and flew out from shelter.

Katherine looked helplessly after the retreating Peggy, and then down at the assorted pair of stockings left for her. “There seems to be nothing to do but put them on,” she sighed resignedly. In a few minutes she emerged from the shadows with as much dignity as she could assume.

And there down the road was Peggy, the full blaze of the autumn sun on her golden head, her eager face uplifted and aglow, and towering above her two good-looking young men, apparently oblivious to everything except this strange and vivacious little apparition that had burst so suddenly upon them.

One, Katherine recognized at once as Jim Huntington Smith, the grandson of old Mr. Huntington, whom they had known last year at Andrews, and through whose generosity Peggy had been enabled to come to college.

The two girls had been the means of discovering Jim’s relationship to the owner of “Gloomy House,” as the old Huntington place was known, and of re-uniting these two members of the same family.

So they regarded Jim as very much their property; as they might look upon some handsome older cousin.

Peggy was waving an arm back towards the pond, and the boys were laughing. Then as she went on with her gesticulations they looked up and saw Katherine.

Katherine had been shrinking back against the trees that lined the water, very conscious of the one tan stocking and the other grey one. She was trying to make up her mind whether to go forward and divert Peggy some way so that she would let these boys go, and would come back and change stockings, or whether she should go back and hide, and run the risk of having the whole joyous trio down the road charge upon her unexpectedly.

It was all settled for her now.

Jim swung his cap in the air and started toward her, while Peggy and the other young man followed more slowly. And even at such a time Katherine couldn’t help noticing the funny little way Peggy’s eye-lashes kept sweeping down and up again, and how pretty and pink her face was.

“Oh,” smiled Katherine to herself, “if she should suddenly wake up and notice her own feet.”

“Well, Katherine Foster, how are you?” Jim was saying, wringing her hand heartily. “This is certainly fine. Bud and I walked over from Amherst to get some cider, but found there was none to be had. But meeting you people compensates for it all.”

“Oh, but there’s going to be some cider, too,” Katherine informed him; “that’s what we’re waiting for. The man is just finishing his dinner and he promised to come over and make some for us. I hope he’ll let us watch him—I never saw any cider made.”

“We’ll stick around.”

“Do—and maybe———”

“Well?”

“Maybe you’ll help us carry our jug home. It’s just inside the trees there.”

“I should say we will. It turns out to be mutually lucky that we met; we have the advantage of cider being made and you get your jug carried home. How’s Hampton anyway? Like it as well as you thought you would? Peggy has sent me a post-card now and then, but they all say the regulation thing: ‘Having a glorious time, the cross is our room,’ ‘Perfectly lovely up here, nice weather for ducks,’—you know the kind.”

Katherine laughed. She remembered the day she and Peggy had picked out a complete set of post-cards with Hampton views, and how they had been in the habit of dispatching them with the most bromidic messages they could think of, to their friend at Amherst.

“We just did it for fun,” she told him now. “We wanted to embarrass you before the other fellows by having a perfect flood of the usual type of post-cards coming in from a girls’ college. We thought you’d know. Why, we even signed them all sorts of different things—‘Essie,’ and ‘Jennie’ and ‘Millicent’ and——”

“And Marmalade,” added Jim with a twinkle in his eye. “I have them all, making a border around my room. The other boys are green with envy. They——”

At this moment Peggy and her companion reached them, and Peggy interrupted Jim in perfect unconcern.

“Katherine, I want you to meet Mr. Bevington, of Amherst college; Mr. Bevington, this is Miss Foster, my room-mate.”

“Awfully pleased to meet you,” murmured the Bevington youth over Katherine’s hand.

“You may not be when you know what your friend, Jim, has volunteered for you,” laughed Katherine.

“It couldn’t make any difference.”

“He’s promised that you and he will carry our cider jug home for us when we get it filled.”

“Has he?” cried Peggy delightedly. “Oh, that’s going to be lovely. It was awfully heavy, Mr. Bevington, when we were dragging it over here. At first it seemed as light as a feather, but before we had traveled a mile it became as heavy and awkward as a cannon ball.”

“So you see,” Katherine turned and laughed up at Bud Bevington, “there’s an awful task ahead of you.”

But of course both young men were delighted to carry any burden for two such charming young ladies, and as they started back toward the mill the talk veered to other subjects and ranged from sports to house dances, when the owner of the mill came up to them.

“Are you the college girls that wanted the cider?” he asked jovially.

“Two of us are,” Peggy answered primly. “But all of us would like to come and watch you make it if we may.”

“You can help,” answered the man.

So with that delightful prospect ahead of them, they entered the rambling building, dim except where the sunlight found a crack between the dusty boards and streamed weakly in.

They followed the man up a winding stairway, that was like climbing to some quaint old attic. There was one place where they could look down and see the black, gold-specked water rushing away under the stairs. It gave Peggy a creepy feeling. The specks of gold were dots of light that fell into its darkness.

“It—makes an awful roaring noise—kind of subterranean sound,” murmured Katherine, but nobody heard her, because of the rush of the stream.

When they reached the loft above, they stood to one side waiting for the man to begin.

“The young ladies are going to make the cider,” he said.

“Oh,” cried Peggy, “that’s fine, but how do we begin?”

The man hauled over several large sacks of apples, lifted a round cover in the floor, bringing to view a kind of chute.

“Pour them apples down there,” he invited.

With the assistance of the boys, they lifted the sacks and the apples went tumbling down through the opening. But Peggy and Katherine were aghast to see what kind of apples they were.

“Why, some of those I poured down were just—awfully bad,” declared Peggy. “In fact, quite decomposed,” she added facetiously.

“Don’t they get sorted out down below?” Katherine inquired anxiously when the last of the sacks had been emptied.

But the cider man only laughed.

When they went down, the apples fell into a kind of wagon without wheels, which moved slowly by machinery, till it reached a certain place, where heavy weights came down from above and slowly crushed the fruit. Very soon a small stream of clear amber juice ran down a trough and into a large hogshead.

The cider man filled their jug, and then gave them each a glass, and told them to drink all they wanted from the hogshead, without additional charge, since he had made the cider just for them.

Sweet, clear and refreshing as any cider in the world, this came to their thirsty lips. And yet—the girls thought they had never enjoyed cider less. The memory of that collection of apples that had gone hurtling down the chute!

The boys, however, were enthusiastic, because Peggy and Katherine had made it, and they praised it highly enough so that the kindly owner of the mill did not notice the heroic efforts of his two feminine guests to seem appreciative.

Out into the sunlight again the little party came, Jim carrying the jug nonchalantly on his shoulder.

“Rebecca at the well,” he laughed; “here she is in moving pictures.”

And the others laughed, too, and began the long walk toward Hampton, as refreshed as if they were just starting out for the day.

The farmer stood in the doorway of his mill, and watched the departure with a friendly smile.

There is nothing so wonderfully satisfying as college Saturday afternoon, with all lessons forgotten—and only a restful Sunday in the immediate future. And such a perfect fall day as this!

The friends strolled leisurely along, enjoying the brilliant coloring of the trees, and the beautiful golden sunlight of a late October afternoon.

They had nearly reached Hampton village and Katherine was beginning to think that Peggy would reach Ambler House without discovering her mistake about the stockings when, with a thrill of horror, she heard her say, “Look at my feet, how dusty they are—you couldn’t tell what color shoes I had on.”

“But, oh, dear, if they aren’t blind they can tell what color stockings,” moaned Katherine to herself.

Politely Jim and their new friend glanced down at the dusty oxfords.

Jim gave a start and was about to speak, when Katherine saw him suddenly look at her feet, too. His eyes twinkled.

“Is that a—new fad?” he asked finally. “A fellow would never dare adopt anything so radical.”

“Is what a new fad?” demanded the unconscious Peggy, and then she looked down and saw.

Her face burned with a quick red, but she laughed infectiously. “We—we went wading, and I suppose I did this when I saw you, Jim, so it’s all his fault. Kay dear, can you forgive?”

Jim and Bud laughed with her, and of course the devoted Katherine forgave on the spot.

Young men are not allowed to linger in the grounds at Hampton, so the adieus were quickly said and Peggy and Katherine hurried across the campus to Ambler House.

No sooner had they reached their room than word went down the hall that there was cider in room 22, and one by one the girls on the second floor found excuses to drop into Peggy’s and Katherine’s room. They were most generously supplied with cider, as they hoped they would be, and Peggy and Katherine had no wish to keep any of it for themselves, after they had seen the sort of apples that went into it.

“Funny thing,” said Peggy sadly as they were dressing for the evening later, “I don’t believe I’ll ever like cider so very much again.”

“No,” agreed Katherine, “the safest way to do, if you want to keep your enthusiasm for anything, is not to know how it’s made.”

“You’re right. I’ll shut my eyes more after this,” laughed Peggy, “but anyway, dear room-mate, we had an awfully nice time, didn’t we?”

“Oh, so, so,” answered Katherine noncommittally.