h up somewhere amid the cloud of beeches and buttonwood trees, our log
cabin lay hid, in a gully made by the little stream that filled our pails
with a silver trickle over a staircase of shelving rock, and up there
Colin was already busy with his skilled French cookery, preparing our
evening meal. The woods still made a pompous show of leaves, but I knew
it to be a hollow sham, a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off by
equinoctial fury, a precarious stage-setting, ready to be blown down at
the first gusts from the north. A forlorn bird here and there made a thin
piping, as it flitted homelessly amid the bleached long grasses, and the
frail silk of the milkweed pods came floating along ghostlike on the
evening breeze.

Yes! It was true. Summer was beginning to pack up, the great
stage-carpenter was about to change the scene, and the great theatre was
full of echoes and sighs and sounds of farewell. Of course, we had known
it for some time, but had not had the heart to admit it to each other,
could not find courage to say that one more golden Summer was at an end.
But the paper I had torn from the roadside left us no further shred of
illusion. There was an authoritative announcement there was no blinking,
a notice to quit there was no gain-saying.

As I came to the crest of the hill, and in sight of the shack, shining
with early lamp-light deep down among the trees of the gully, I could see
Colin innocently at work on a salad, and hear him humming to himself his
eternal "_Vive le Capitaine_."

It was too pathetic. I believe the tears came to my eyes.

"Colin," I said, as I at length arrived and set down my basket of
potatoes, "read this."

He took the paper from my hand and read:

"_Sun-up Baseball Club. September_ 19, 1908. _Last Match of the Season_"

He knew what I meant.

"Yes!" he said. "It is the epitaph of Summer."

CHAPTER II

AT EVENING I CAME TO THE WOOD

My solitude had been kindly lent to me for the Summer by a friend, the
prophet-proprietor of a certain famous Well of Truth some four miles
away, whither souls flocked from all parts of America to drink of the
living waters. I had been feeling town-worn and world-weary, and my
friend had written me saying: "At Elim are twelve wells and seventy
palm-trees," and so to Elim I had betaken myself. After a brief sojourn
there, drinking of the waters, and building up on the strong diet of the
sage's living words, he had given me the key to some