e Jonathan went up to the side door to make inquiries.
After he had started up the path I saw, from my vantage-point, the lady
of the farm returning from her "garden patch," and my heart went out in
pity to Jonathan. If I could have called him back I would have done so,
merely on the testimony of the lady's gait and figure. I had never fully
realized how expressive these could be. Her hips, her shoulders, the set
of her head, the way she planted her feet on the uneven flagging-stones
of the path, each heavy line and each sodden motion, bespoke
inhospitality, intolerance, impenetrable disapproval of everything
unfamiliar. I watched Jonathan turn back from the door at the sound of
her steps, and in the short colloquy that followed, though I could hear
nothing, I could see those hips and shoulders settling themselves yet
more decisively, while Jonathan's attitude grew more studiously
courteous. But when he had lifted his hat again and turned from that
monument of immobile unpleasantness I saw his face relax into lines,
partly of amusement, partly of chagrin; and as he took his seat beside
me and drove on, he murmured snatches of quotation--"No; couldn't
possibly," "No; don't know anybody that could," "No; never did such a
thing," "No; the people in the next house've just had a funeral; sure
_they_ couldn't"; and finally he broke into a chuckle as he quoted,
"Well, there _is_ some folks about two mile down might mebbe take ye;
they does sometimes harbor peddlers 'n' such like." Jonathan was hardly
willing to try again so near by; he regarded the whole neighborhood as
tainted. Yet it was little more than two miles beyond, on that same
afternoon, that we found lodgings with the most delightful, the most
hospitable friends of all--for friends they became, taking us into
their circle as if we belonged to it by right of birth, coddling us as
one ought never to expect to be coddled save by one's own mother or
grandmother.

Ostensibly, our drive was a trout-fishing trip, and part of the fun
certainly was the fishing. Not that we caught so many. If we had
seriously wished to make a score, we might better have stayed at home
and fished in our own haunts, where we knew every pool and just how and
when to fish it. But it was interesting to explore new brooks, and as we
never failed to get enough trout for at least one meal a day, what more
could we wish? And such brooks! New England is surely the land of
beautiful brooks. They are all