ed
with scalps, off you dived into the pool and came up a white man. Finally,
you stood on one leg and jounced the water from your ear, or pulled a
bloodsucker from your toes before he sapped your life--for this tiny
creature of the rocks was credited with the gift of prodigious inflation,
and might inhale you, blood, sinews, suspenders and all, if left to his
ugly purpose.

Farms should not be too precisely located; at least this is true of farms
which, like my grandfather's, hang in a mist of memory. I read once of a
wonderful spot--quite inferior, doubtless, to my grandfather's farm--which
was located by evil directions intentionally to throw a seeker off.
Munchausen, you will recall, in the placing of his magic countries, was not
above this agreeable villainy. Robinson Crusoe was loose and vague in the
placing of his island. It is said that Izaak Walton waved a hand obscurely
toward the stream where he had made a catch, but could not be cornered to a
nice direction, lest his pool be overrun. In early youth, I myself went, on
a mischievous hint, to explore a remote region which I was told lay in the
dark behind the kindling pile. But because I moved in a fearful darkness,
quite beyond the pale light from the furnace room, I lost the path. It did
not lead me to the peaks and the roaring waters.

But the farm was reached by more open methods. Dolly and the phaeton were
the chief instruments. First--if you were so sunk in ignorance as not to
know the road--you inquired of everybody for the chewing gum factory, to be
known by its smell of peppermint. Then you sought the high bridge over the
railroad tracks. Beyond was Kamm's Corners. Here, at a turn of the road,
was a general store whose shelves sampled the produce of this whole fair
world and the factories thereof. One might have thought that the proprietor
emulated Noah at the flood by bidding two of each created things to find a
place inside.

Beyond Kamm's Corners you came to the great valley. When almost down the
hill you passed a house with broken windows and unkept grass. This house,
by report, was haunted, but you could laugh at such tales while the morning
sun was up. At the bottom of the hill a bridge crossed the river, with
loose planking that rattled as though the man who made nails was dead.

Beyond the bridge, at the first rise of ground, the horse stopped--for I
assume that you drove a sagacious animal--by way of hint that every one
of sound limb get ou