that Sunday--I was lying under the spinet--I heard Toby's
fiddle. He'd just done his supper, which he always took late and heavy.
"Gert," says he, "get the horses. Liberty and Independence for Ever! The
flowers appear upon the earth, and the time of the singing of birds is
come. We are going to my country seat in Lebanon."

'I rubbed my eyes, and fetched 'em out of the "Buck" stables. Red Jacket
was there saddling his, and when I'd packed the saddle-bags we three
rode up Race Street to the Ferry by starlight. So we went travelling.
It's a kindly, softly country there, back of Philadelphia among the
German towns, Lancaster way. Little houses and bursting big barns, fat
cattle, fat women, and all as peaceful as Heaven might be if they farmed
there. Toby sold medicines out of his saddlebags, and gave the French
war-news to folk along the roads. Him and his long-hilted umberell
was as well known as the stage-coaches. He took orders for that famous
Seneca Oil which he had the secret of from Red Jacket's Indians, and he
slept in friends' farmhouses, but he would shut all the windows; so Red
Jacket and me slept outside. There's nothing to hurt except snakes--and
they slip away quick enough if you thrash in the bushes.'

'I'd have liked that!' said Dan.

'I'd no fault to find with those days. In the cool o' the morning the
cat-bird sings. He's something to listen to. And there's a smell of wild
grape-vine growing in damp hollows which you drop into, after long rides
in the heat, which is beyond compare for sweetness. So's the puffs out
of the pine woods of afternoons. Come sundown, the frogs strike up, and
later on the fireflies dance in the corn. Oh me, the fireflies in the
corn! We were a week or ten days on the road, tacking from one place to
another--such as Lancaster, Bethlehem-Ephrata--"thou Bethlehem-Ephrata."
No odds--I loved the going about. And so we jogged 'into dozy little
Lebanon by the Blue Mountains, where Toby had a cottage and a garden of
all fruits. He come north every year for this wonderful Seneca Oil the
Seneca Indians made for him. They'd never sell to any one else, and he
doctored 'em with von Swieten pills, which they valued more than their
own oil. He could do what he chose with them, and, of course, he tried
to make them Moravians. The Senecas are a seemly, quiet people, and
they'd had trouble enough from white men--American and English--during
the wars, to keep 'em in that walk. They lived on a Rese