ose who don't know what good hay really is."

"I guess we must have met him some ten or twelve miles back. We had
quite a time passing him, for it was where the road runs along a side
hill, with the bluff on one side and a steep embankment on the other. We
stopped our car for his team was scared and after some delay they
passed. They seemed to appreciate what we did, instead of rushing by and
probably scaring the whole outfit into the ditch. The girl was rather
pretty."

"Ah, you boys!" The widow smiled shrewdly. "Always an eye out for the
girls! But don't you allow yourselves to think that what a girl looks,
so she always is underneath the surface."

"Are you coming back this way?" the widow finally asked, as the car was
about to start. "If you don't stop, I--I will feel hurt. I'm homesick at
times for the town where I was raised."

"Tell you what," said Billy after the car had left the small but busy
town a mile or two in their rear, "Mrs. Ewing treated us bang up, but
she's a keen one, after all. I'm glad we saw her. It will be something
to tell McKnight when we get home. Do you reckon those Feeneys are the
ones we passed?"

"What if they are or if they ain't?" demanded Paul. "We won't be likely
to meet 'em again, will we?"

"Oh, you shut up, Jonesy. There's no one interested in 'em but Phil, and
the best way to define that is by a lesson in spelling." Here Billy made
a comical face as he began: "N-a-n, Nan. That, translated into plain
lingo, means pretty girl--ouch! Quit, Phil!" For Phil, seated in the
tonneau with Worth, had administered a decided pinch.

On sped the Big Six, easily showing what she could do along an
increasingly rough road that might once have been a much traveled
highway but now showed ample signs of the neglect of later years. The
wooded tracts increased, growing larger in area; the half cultivated
fields evinced even more of the neglect and shagginess that wait on
lands wholly or in part abandoned by man. Sundry denizens of the woods
such as rabbits, squirrels, even a stray fox, together with many birds,
and upflying broods of quail, also indicated that nature was gradually
replacing human inactivity in her own way.

"By the way," remarked Worth, "didn't that man with the hay say he lived
some three miles from that town we stopped in--what's the confounded
name?"

"Midlandville, stupid!" This from P. Jones, Esq., with a superior air.
"That was one of the first things I heard."

"Co