rom his first college term. His very face wore the boy's
open, innocent, earnest look that used to attract men to him in his
first college year. His delight in the fields and woods, in the sweet
country air and the sunlight, was without bound. How often had we driven
this road together in the old days!

Every turn was familiar. The swamp where the tamaracks stood straight
and slim out of their beds of moss; the brule, as we used to call it,
where the pine-stumps, huge and blackened, were half-hidden by the new
growth of poplars and soft maples; the big hill, where we used to get
out and walk when the roads were bad; the orchards, where the harvest
apples were best and most accessible--all had their memories.

It was one of those perfect afternoons that so often come in the early
Canadian summer, before Nature grows weary with the heat. The white
gravel road was trimmed on either side with turf of living green, close
cropped by the sheep that wandered in flocks along its whole length.
Beyond the picturesque snake-fences stretched the fields of springing
grain, of varying shades of green, with here and there a dark brown
patch, marking a turnip field or summer fallow, and far back were the
woods of maple and beech and elm, with here and there the tufted top of
a mighty pine, the lonely representative of a vanished race, standing
clear above the humbler trees.

As we drove through the big swamp, where the yawning, haunted gully
plunges down to its gloomy depths, Graeme reminded me of that night when
our horse saw something in that same gully, and refused to go past; and
I felt again, though it was broad daylight, something of the grue that
shivered down my back, as I saw in the moonlight the gleam of a white
thing far through the pine trunks.

As we came nearer home the houses became familiar. Every house had its
tale: we had eaten or slept in most of them; we had sampled apples, and
cherries, and plums from their orchards, openly as guests, or secretly
as marauders, under cover of night--the more delightful way, I fear.
Ah! happy days, with these innocent crimes and fleeting remorses, how
bravely we faced them, and how gaily we lived them, and how yearningly
we look back at them now! The sun was just dipping into the tree-tops
of the distant woods behind as we came to the top of the last hill that
overlooked the valley, in which lay the village of Riverdale. Wooded
hills stood about it on three sides, and, where the hi