rkness smelling of cows and apples, when we groped for it among
the woods the evening before. At starting out next morning, we inquired
the way to Watkins of a storekeeper standing at his shop-door. He was in
conversation with an acquaintance, and our questions occasioned a lively
argument as to which was the better of two roads. The acquaintance was
for the road through "Pine Creek," and he added, with a grim smile, "I
guess I should know; I've travelled it often enough with a heavy load
behind"; and the recollection of the rough hills he had gone bumping
over, all evidently fresh in his mind, seemed to give him a curious
amusement. It transpired that he was an undertaker!

So we took the road to Pine Creek, but at the threshold of the village
our fancy was taken by the particularly quaint white wooden
meeting-house, surrounded on three sides with tie-up sheds for vehicles,
each stall having a name affixed to it, like a pew: "P. Yawger," "A.W.
Gillum," "Pastor," and so on. Here the pious of the district tied up
their buggies while they went within to pray, and these sacred stalls
made a quaint picture for the imagination of outlying farmers driving to
meeting over the hills on Sabbath mornings.

It was a beautiful morning of veiled sunshine, so warm that some hardy
crickets chirped faintly as we went along. Once a blue jay came and
looked at us, and the squirrels whirred among the chestnuts and
hickories, and the roadsides were so thickly strewn with fallen nuts that
we made but slow progress, stopping all the time to fill our pockets.

For a full hour we sat down with a couple of stones for nut-crackers, and
forgot each other and everything else in the hypnotizing occupation of
cracking hickory-nuts. And we told each other that thus do grown sad men
become boys again, by a woodside, of an October morning, cracking
hickory-nuts, the world well lost.

CHAPTER XXI

OCTOBER ROSES AND A YOUNG GIRL'S FACE

The undertaker was certainly right about the road. I think he must have
had a flash of poetic insight into our taste in roads. This was not, as a
rule, understood by the friendly country folk. Their ideas and ours as to
what constituted a good road differed beyond the possibility of
harmonizing. When they said that a road was good they meant that it was
straight, level, and businesslike. When they said that a road was bad
they meant that it was rugged, rambling and picturesque. So, to their
bewilderment, whe