ther-told-me-to-take-_this_,--" she said,--"Oh, then do
take Three Meadows!" She has been there all summer, and she thinks I
can board at the same place--with Angelique Larideau Gillespie,
"Mis' Deac'n Gillespie." She is Canadian-French and the only woman
on the island who can cook any other way than frying. The bad little
hotel is closing. She was so merry and footloose and free, Michael!
That's exactly the sort of old maid I mean to be----

"_Love of roving foot and joy of roving eye_----"

We have been wriggling up a cunning little river, bumping into
clumsy landings here and there and now the porter-purser-steward-
newsagent-cabin-boy-and-guide says the next one is mine.

Wish me luck, Michael Daragh!

J. V.

_Three Meadows, Maine,
Friday Afternoon._

It would be tea time anywhere else, Michael Daragh, but it gives no
tea here. Eating between meals is deplored and is referred to as
"piecing." Will you ask Mrs. Hills to express my tea basket and two
cups?

This is a lamb of an island. The land lifts away to low hills and the
village has splashed a little way up on the sides. A curtain of filmy
fog has just risen clear of the treetops and everything is graciously
gray. No one ever comes so late in the season and this awful, little
hotel is closing,--it ought to be closed and sealed forever.
Everything about the tiny town is refreshing. A citizen finished up a
game of checkers before he went down to consider the case of my
trunk. Then it took him some time to wake up his horse, which did a
bewildered Lady Macbeth up the street. I was walking beside, and
suddenly a roly-poly puppy slipped away from a boy and ran straight
under the clumsy hoofs.... You never heard such ki-yi's. You'd think
he was being vivisected. There was a shrieking streak of white and he
disappeared under a culvert. The old mare stopped, wide-awake and
horror-stricken, and the boy--a pitiful little person with his head
held tautly back, almost a hunchback--and the driver and I flew to
the spot and all the village Hectors laid their helmets by and gave
themselves to the hour. The sweetest old man in rusty black laid
right down flat on his stomach and peeked into the dusty tunnel,
calling, "Come, pup! Come, pup! Come, _dear_!" But the yammerings
went on.

Finally the blacksmith next