never we had a choice of good or bad roads, we always
chose the bad. And, to get at what we really wanted, we learned to
inquire which was the worst road to such and such a place. That we knew
would be the road for us. From their point of view, the road we were on
was as bad as could be; but, as I said, the undertaker evidently
understood us, and had sent us into a region of whimsically sudden hills
and rock and wooded wilderness, a swart country of lonely, rugged
uplands, with but a solitary house here and there for miles. It was
resting at the top of one of these hard-won acclivities that we came
upon--and remember that it was the middle of October--two wild roses
blooming by the roadside. This seems a fact worthy the attention of
botanical societies, and I still have the roses pressed for the
inspection of the learned between the pages of my travelling copy of Hans
Andersen's "Fairy Tales."

A fact additionally curious was that the bush on which the flowers grew
seemed to be the only rose-bush in the region. We looked about us in
vain to find another. How had that single rose-bush come to be, an
uncompanioned exotic, in the rough society of pines and oaks and
hickories, on a rocky hill-top swept by the North wind, and how had those
frail, scented petals found strength and courage thus to bloom alone in
the doorway of Winter? And, why, out of all the roses of the world, had
these two been chosen, still, so late in the year, to hold up the
tattered standard of Summer?

_Why, in the empty Autumn woods,
And all the loss and end of things,
Does one leaf linger on the tree;
Why is it only one bird sings?

And why, across the aching field,
Does one lone cricket chirrup on;
Why one surviving butterfly,
With all its bright companions gone?

And why, when faces all about
Whiten and wither hour by hour,
Does one old face bloom on so sweet,
As young as when it was a flower_?

The same mystery was again presented to us a little farther along the
road, as we stopped at a lone schoolhouse among the hills, the only house
to be seen, and asked our way of the young schoolmarm. The door had been
left half open, and, knocking, we had stepped into the almost empty
schoolroom, with its portrait of Lincoln and a map of the United States.
Three scholars sat there with their kindly-faced teacher, studying
geography amid the silence of the hills, which the little room seemed to
concentrate in a murmuring hush, like a she