tolerant
catholicity of spirit: the best of country life is that it breeds the
spirit of helpful, homely, kindly neighborliness. The suburban-dweller,
who shares in both lives, is perhaps a little too ready to pride himself
in having learned the lesson of the great metropolis, but the other and
homelier lesson is taught so gradually and so unobtrusively, that he
often learns it quite unconsciously; and goes back, perhaps, to his old
existence in the city, only to realize that a certain charm has gone out
of life which he misses without knowing just what he has lost. He
thinks, perhaps, it is exercise he lacks. And it is, indeed--the
exercise of certain gentle sympathies, that thrive as poorly in the
town's crowded life as the country wild-flowers thrive in the
flower-pots of tenement-house windows.

It was between three and four o'clock of an August night--a dark, warm,
hazy night, breathless, heavy and full of the smell of grass and trees
and dew-moistened earth, when a man galloped up one of those long
suburban streets, where the houses stand at wide intervals, each behind
its trim lawn, or old-fashioned flower-garden, relieved, even in the
darkness, against a great rear-wood screen of lofty trees. Up the
driveway of one of these he turned, his horse's hoof-beats dropping
clear and sharp on the hard macadam. He reined up at the house and
rapped a loud tattoo with the stock of his whip on a pillar of the
veranda.

It was a minute or two before the noise, loud as it was, had reached the
ears of two sleepers in the bedroom, just above his head. A much less
startling sound would have awakened a whole city household; but slumber
in the country has a slumber of its own: in summer time a slumber born
of night-air, laden with the odors of vegetation, and silent except for
the drowsy chirp of birds that stir in vine and tree. The wife awoke
first, listened for a second, and aroused her husband, who went to the
window. He raised the screen and looked out.

[Illustration]

"Who is it?" he said, without nervousness or surprise, though ten years
before in his city home such a summons might have shaken his spirit with
anxious dread.

"I'm Latimer," said the man on the horse, briefly. "That boy of
Penrhyn's--the little one with the yellow hair--is lost. He got up and
slipped out the house, somehow, about an hour ago, they think, and
they've found one of his playthings nearly half a mile down the
Romneytown Road."

"Where s