nother occasion, we had been seated awhile under a walnut tree
growing near a farm, and scattering its fruitage half across the
highroad. Colin had been anointing his suffering foot, and, as I told
him, looked strongly reminiscent of a certain famous corn-cure
advertisement. Meanwhile, I had been once more quoting Virgil: "The
walnut in the woodland attires herself in wealth of blossom and bends
with scented boughs," when there approached with slow step an old,
white-haired lady, at once gentle and severe in appearance, accompanied
by a younger lady. When they had arrived in front of us, the old lady in
measured tones of sorrow rather than anger, said: "We rather needed those
walnuts--" Dear soul! she evidently thought that we had been filling
our knapsacks with her nuts, and it took some little astonished
expostulation on our part to convince her that we hadn't. This affront
seemed to sink no little into Colin's sensitive Latin soul--and they were
public enough walnuts, anyway, scattered, as they were, across the public
road! But Colin couldn't get over it for some time, and I suspected that
he was the more sensitive from his recently--owing, doubtless, to his
distinguished Gallic appearance--having been profanely greeted by some
irreverent boys with the word "Spaghetti!" However, there was balm for
our wounded feelings a little farther along the road, when a
companionable old farmer greeted us with:

"Well, boys! out for a walk? It's easy seeing you're no tramps."

Colin's expression was a study in gratitude. The farmer was a fine,
soldierly old fellow, who told me that he was half English, too, on his
father's side.

"But my mother," he added, "was a good blue-bellied Yankee."

We lured him on to using that delightfully quaint expression again before
we left him; and we also learned from him valuable information as to the
possibilities of lunch farther along the road, for we were in a lonely
district with no inns, and it was Sunday.

In regard to lunch, I suppose that in prosaically paying our way for bed
and board as we fared along we fell short of the Arcadian theory of
walking-tours in which the wayfarer, like a mendicant friar, takes toll
of lunch and dinner from the hospitable farmer of sentimental legend, and
sleeps for choice in barns, hayricks or hedgesides. Now, sleeping out of
doors in October, if you have ever tried it, is a very different thing
from sleeping out of doors in June, and as for rural hosp