emerged from a brief incarceration.

He pushed his bicycle through the maple walk to the brow of the hill
from which he had first looked over the valley toward the west. There
in the distance the village he had noted sparkled like a handful of
white dice thrown carelessly down against the earth. He fixed upon
this point as the terminus of his ride, and began to coast down the
long slope, leaving a trail of grey dust to mark his flight. There was
a peculiar exhilaration in the dry heat of the October afternoon.
Flocks of crows passed over his head with raucous cries. The
cornstalks were stacked in serried array, like Indian wigwams, and
heaps of apples, red and yellow and russet brown, lay ungathered in the
orchards.

Through this rich and varied scene he sped swiftly, filled with all a
Westerner's keen appreciation of a New England landscape, constantly
contrasting the arid glories of deserts he had seen with the plenty
about him. The farms of the fertile tracts of California were
infinitely greater, the methods by which they were worked more modern,
but about these smaller homesteads hung an atmosphere of history and
romance. Leigh might champion the West in the presence of the bishop,
but now, alone with his own thoughts, he paid tribute to the land in
which the liberties of his country had been cradled. He seemed to have
known it of old, though he now saw it for the first time. This
experience was not a discovery, but a reacquaintance. From these old
farmhouses, with their sagging roof-trees and windows filled with small
panes, the minute men had issued with their muskets to repel the
invader. At yonder sweep-well some English soldier had perhaps stopped
in his dusty retreat for a drink of water, and had paid the penalty of
his life for the delay. Above all, the fact that this was the native
country of the woman he loved was ever present in his mind to add
radiance to the afternoon.

At a point where the road took a sudden dip and curved in a wide sweep
toward the southwest, his attention was arrested by an old house that
lay nestled in the bend as in an encircling arm. The colour had once
been red, but was now faded by many suns and washed thin by innumerable
rains. A rampart of loose stones, overgrown with brambles and broken
in places as if for the passage of cattle, enclosed the premises, and
the typical well of the country lifted its curving pole in the front
yard only a few feet from the roadway