d Harding from the rear seat in the
tonneau.

"Stop, Jacques Henri!" ordered my fair employer, and then I dared look
into her smiling eyes.

"I want to cut some of those willow switches," explained Harding, as
the car stopped.

"What do you want of willow switches, John?" asked Mrs. Harding.

"Going to make whistles out of them," he said, cutting several which
sprouted out from the edge of a spring. "Besides they're good things to
keep the flies from biting the tonneau. Smith runs so slow that they are
stealing a ride."

"Defend me," I said to my employer.

"Jacques Henri is doing as he is told," declared Miss Harding.

The spring was so inviting that we sampled its clear, cold water.
Harding in the meantime whittling industriously on his willow switch.
When he found that his whistle would "blow" he was as pleased as if he
had designed a new type of locomotive.

A mile farther on we passed sedately through a country village and
aroused the fleeting interest of the loungers in front of the combined
post-office and news store. Then we entered a fine farming country, and
from it plunged into a forest so dense that the overhanging boughs
almost spanned our pathway.

Moss-covered stone walls lined both sides of the road. Everywhere was a
profusion of wild flowers, their petals brushing against our tires, and
their flaunting reds, yellows, and blues brightening the gloom of the
encompassing wood. A gray squirrel scampered across our path and
impudent chipmunks chattered to right and left. And then we came to a
small clearing filled with the wagons, tents and litter of a gipsy camp.

"Let's stop and have our fortunes told!" cried Miss Dangerfield, but my
employer vetoed that proposition. It was a vivid flash of colour. The
brightly painted wagons with their canvas tops, the red-shirted men,
black of hair and eyes, olive of skin, and graceful in their laziness;
the older women bare-headed, bent of shoulder, and brilliantly shrouded
in shawls; the younger women straight as arrows, bold and keen of
glance, and decked in ribbons and jewelry, and on every hand swarms of
gipsy children, more or less clothed. The blue smoke of their camp-fires
twisted through the dark green of the fir trees in the background.

Again the forest closed upon us. The grade became steeper, and in places
our road had been blasted through solid rock. And then we reached the
summit of this ridge, and like a flash the superb panorama of the H