OW AT THE ROAD-BEND."]

Toward evening came home a creel lined with bog moss; within, a rainbow
glimmer of brook trout, a posy of shad-bush, marsh marigolds, anemones,
and rosy spring beauties from the river woods,--with three cheerfully
tired men, who gathered by the den hearth fire with coffee cup and pipe,
inside an admiring but sleepy circle of beagle hounds, who had run free
the livelong day and who could doubtless impart the latest rabbit news
with thrilling detail. All this and much more made up to-day, one of red
letters.

Yesterday, Monday, was quite different, and if not absolutely black, was
decidedly slate coloured. It is only when some one of the household is
positively ill that the record must be set down in black characters, for
what else really counts? Why is it that the city folk persist in judging
all rural days alike, that is until they have once really _lived_ in the
country, not merely boarded and tried to kill time and their own
digestions at one and the same moment.

Such exceptional days as yesterday should only be chronicled now and
then to give an added halo to happy to-morrows,--disagreeables are
remembered quite long enough by perverse human nature.

Yesterday began with the pipe from the water-back bursting, thereby
doing away with hot water for shaving and the range fire at the same
time. The coffee resented hurry, and the contact with an oil stove
developed the peanutty side of its disposition, something that is latent
in the best and most equable of brands.

The spring timetable having changed at midnight Sunday, unobserved by
Evan, he missed the early train, which it was especially important that
he should take. Three other men found themselves in the same
predicament, two being Bluffers and one a Plotter. (These are the names
given hereabout to our two colonies of non-natives. The Bluffers are the
people of the Bluffs, who always drive to the station; the Plotters,
living on a pretty tract of land near the village that was "plotted"
into house-lots a few years ago, have the usual newcomer's hallucination
about making money from raising chickens, and always walk.)

After a hasty consultation, one of the Bluffers telephoned for his
automobile and invited the others to make the trip to town with him. In
order to reach the north turnpike that runs fairly straight to the city,
the chauffeur, a novice in local byways, proposed to take a short cut
through our wood road, instead of wheeli