ing that hinted at mellowed beauty, firelight and cheerful voices
within.

Valiant heaved a long sigh of satisfaction as he stood in the sunlight
gazing at the results of his labors. He was not now the flippant
boulevardier to whom money was the _sine qua non_ of existence. He had
learned a sovereign lesson--one gained not through the push and fight
of crowds, but in the simple peace of a countryside, unvexed by the
clamor of gold and the complex problems of a competitive existence--that
he had inherited a need of activity, of achievement: that he had been
born to do. He had worked hard, with hand and foot, with hoe and
mattock--strenuous perspiring effort that made his blood course fast and
brought muscle-weariness over which nature had nightly poured her
soothing medicaments of peace and sleep. His tanned face was as clear as
a fine brown porcelain, his eye bright, and his muscles rippled up
under his skin with elastic power.

"Chum," he said, to the dog rolling on his back in the grass, "what do
you think of it all, anyway?" He reached down, seized a hind leg and
whirling him around like a teetotum, sent him flying into the bushes,
whence Chum launched again upon him, like a catapult. He caught the
white shoulders and held him vise-like. "Just about right, eh? But wait
till we get those ramblers!

"And to think," he continued, whimsically releasing him, "that I might
have gone on, one of the little-neck-clam crowd I've always trained
with, at the same old pace, till the Vermouth-cocktail-Palm-Beach career
got a double Nelson on me and the umpire counted me out. And I'd have
ended by lazying along through my forties with a bay-window and a bunch
of boudoir keys! Now I can kiss my hand to it all. At this moment I
wouldn't swap this old house and land, and the sunshine and that
'gyarden' and Unc' Jefferson and Aunt Daph and the chickens and the
birds and all the rest of it, for a mile of Millionaires' Row."

He drew from his jacket pocket a somewhat worn note and unfolded the
dainty paper with its characteristic twirly handwriting. "The scarlet
geraniums rimming the porch," he muttered, "the coral honeysuckle on
the old dead tulip-tree, and the fuchsias and verbenas by the straight
walk. How right she is! They're all growing, too. I haven't lost a
single slip." He caught himself up short, strode to the nearest
porch-pillar and rapped on it smartly with his knuckles.

"I must knock on wood," he said, "or I'll lose m