ed plump and
self-respecting. He had a round red face under his plug hat, twinkling
blue eyes, and a little pursed-up mouth, the shape of which was partly
due to nature and partly to much whistling. Jedediah's pudgy body was
clothed in a suit of large, light checks, and he wore a bright pink
necktie and an amethyst pin. Will I still be believed when I assert
that, in spite of all this, Jedediah was full of, and bubbling over
with, romance?

Romance cares not for appearances and apparently delights in
contradictions. The homely shambling man you pass unnoticed on the
street may have, tucked away in his past, a story more exciting and
thrilling than anything you have ever read in fiction. So it was, in a
measure, with Jedediah; poor, unknown to fame, afflicted with a double
chin and bald spot, reduced to driving a tin-wagon for a living, he
yet had his romance and he was still romantic.

As Jedediah rode through Amberley he looked about him with interest.
He knew it well, although it was fifteen years since he had seen it.
He had been born and brought up in Amberley; he had left it at the age
of twenty-five to make his fortune. But Amberley was Amberley still.
Jedediah found it hard to believe that it or himself was fifteen years
older.

"There's the Stanton place," he said. "Charlie has painted the house
yellow--it used to be white; and Bob Hollman has cut the trees down
behind the blacksmith forge. Bob never had any poetry in his soul--no
romance, as you might say. He was what you might call a plodder--you
might call him that. Get up, my nag, get up. There's the old Harkness
place--seems to be spruced up considerable. Folks used to say if ye
wanted to see how the world looked the morning after the flood just go
into George Harkness's barn-yard on a rainy day. The pond and the old
hills ain't changed any. Get up, my nag, get up. There's the Adams
homestead. Do I really behold it again?"

Jedediah thought the moment deliciously romantic. He revelled in it
and, to match his exhilarated mood, he touched the pony with his whip
and went clinking and glittering down the hill under the poplars at a
dashing rate. He had not intended to offer his wares in Amberley that
day. He meant to break the ice in Occidental, the village beyond. But
he could not pass the Adams place. When he came to the open gate he
turned in under the willows and drove down the wide, shady lane, girt
on both sides with a trim white paling smothered in