en't very well window-dressed; the signs were feeble.... Maybe
some day he'd get back into the shoe business in some town, and he'd
show them--only, how could he talk business to a shoeman when he was
shabby and winter-tanned and none too extravagant in the care of his
reddening hands?

But he was learning something more weighty--the art of handling people,
in the two aspects thereof--bluffing, and backing up the bluff with
force and originality. He came to the commonplace people along the road
as something novel and admirable, a man who had taken his wife and his
poverty and gone seeing the world. When he smiled in a superior way and
said nothing, people immediately believed that he must have been places,
done brave things. He didn't so much bluff them as let them bluff
themselves.... He had never been able to do that in his years as a
foggy-day shadow to the late J. Pilkings.

It is earnestly recommended to all uncomfortable or dissatisfied men
over sixty that they take their wives and their mouth-organs and go
tramping in winter, whether they be bank presidents or shoe-clerks or
writers of fiction or just plain honest men. Though doubtless some of
them may have difficulty in getting their wives to go.

* * * * *

It was early March, a snowy, blustery March, and the Applebys were
plodding through West Virginia. No longer were they the mysterious
"Smiths." Father was rather proud, now, of being Appleby, the
pedestrian. Mother looked stolidly content as she trudged at his side,
ruddy and placid and accustomed to being wept over by every farm-wife.

At an early dusk, with a storm menacing, with the air uneasy and a wind
melancholy in the trees, they struck off by a forest road which would,
they hoped, prove a short cut to the town of Weatherford. They came to
cross-paths, and took the more trodden way, which betrayed them and soon
dwindled to a narrow rut which they could scarcely follow in the
twilight. Father was frightened. They would have to camp in the
woods--and a blizzard was coming.

He saw a light ahead, a shifting, evasive light.

"There's a farm-house or something," he declared, cheerily. "We'll just
nach'ly make 'em give us shelter. Going to storm too bad to do much work
for 'em, and I bet it's some cranky old shellback farmer, living 'way
out here like this. Well, we'll teach the old codger to like music, and
this time I _will_ play my mouth-organ. Ain't you glad we're y