t misfortunes to save half the price, which she
succeeded in doing.

Every day the artist had a few sitters. It was surprising how many of
the bilious, bare-legged children who collected to gaze at his framed
specimens were brought to be photographed, for most of the villagers
were squalidly poor and the farmers were entering their busy season.
During this time he had opened the Harbison domicile to himself, being
son of a friend who had sat in the State legislature with Mr. Harbison.
All Fairfield knew that he went there nearly every day, and that it was
not to shoot with the long-bow on the lawn. They had no idea how he
loved to lounge from one empty room to another of this picturesque,
half-furnished house, and how he was gratified by the fitness of the
inhabitants to their abode. He liked to see Miss Gill tuck a bunch of
peach-blossoms in her coil of hair, and to feel the quickening
influences of spring supplemented by her electricity.

Mrs. Harbison took her earth-loving hands from garden-making and went to
show the young people the ferns in the woods. She pulled her sun-bonnet
over her eyes and trod out with the solid steps of a woman bred to love
the soil under her feet. The photographer sketched along the way, but he
finally sat down by Little Wildcat where the water boiled over boulders,
and Mrs. Harbison went farther to dig ginseng. There was a joyful hurry
of birds all around. That leopard of the Indiana woods, the sycamore,
repeated itself in vistas.

"Sycamores always look like dazzling marble shafts blackened with
patches of moss," said the young man.

"And their leaves," said the girl sitting on the log not far from him,
"smell like poetry. I spread them on my face late in summer after a
shower and suck up their breath. But I never can put the sensation into
words."

"How's that for a sycamore?" he asked, showing a scrap.

She examined it with great satisfaction: "Why do you go about with a
photographic car? Why don't you set out to be an artist?"

He laughed: "Because there is so much of the vagabond in me, I suppose.
Then I never had any education in art. Folks as poor as Job's turkey."

"But a man can do so much or so little."

"Well, when I'm going about with the car I see a great many odd people,
and can pick up little striking things for studies. I get a living, too,
such as it is, which I shouldn't do if I set up as an artist. Look
here!" He turned over his book and showed an etching of M