he Vermont formula for fighting
fire. "They always put for the nearest factory and get all hands out,"
he explained, adding meditatively, as he chewed on a twig: "All the
same, the incident shows what I've always maintained about Molly:
that she is, like 'most everybody, lamentably miscast. Molly's spirit
oughtn't to have taken up its abiding place in that highly ornamental
blond shell, condemned after a fashionable girl's education to
pendulum swings between Paris and New York and Lydford. It doesn't fit
for a cent. It ought to have for habitation a big, gaunt, powerful
man's body, and for occupation the running of a big factory." He
seemed to be philosophizing more to himself than to Sylvia, and beyond
a surprised look into his extremely grimy face, she made no comment.
She had taken for granted from the talk between him and Molly that he
was one of the "forceful, impossible Montgomery cousins," and had
cast her own first remarks in a tone calculated to fit in with
the supposititious dialect of such a person. But his voice, his
intonations, and his whimsical idea about Molly fitted in with the
conception of an "impossible" as little as with the actual visible
facts of his ragged shirt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls.
They toiled upwards in silence for some moments, the man still chewing
on his birch-twig. He noticed her sidelong half-satirical glance at
it. "Don't you want one?" he asked, and gravely cut a long, slim rod
from one of the saplings in the green wall shutting them into the
road. As he gave it to her he explained, "It's the kind they make
birch beer of. You nip off the bark with your teeth. You'll like it."

Still more at sea as to what sort of person he might be, and now
fearing perhaps to wound him if he should turn out to be a very
unsophisticated one, Sylvia obediently set her teeth to the lustrous,
dark bark and tore off a bit, which gave out in her mouth a mild,
pleasant aromatic tang, woodsy and penetrating, unlike any other taste
she knew. "Good, isn't it?" said her companion simply.

She nodded, slowly awakening to a tepid curiosity about the individual
who strode beside her, lanky and powerful in his blue jeans. What an
odd circumstance, her trudging off through the woods thus with a guide
of whom she knew nothing except that he was Molly Sommerville's cousin
and worked a Vermont farm--and had certainly the dirtiest face she had
ever seen, with the exception of the coal-blackened stoke