pointed. "No one knows except
the young lady I am trying to find. Are you sure you cannot help me at
all? There is no newcomer in the neighborhood, no visitor at any house
who might be the one I am looking for?"

He shook his head, giving back the pomander with marked reluctance.

"No one who might be able to tell more than yourself?" I persisted.

A gleam of humor lit his eyes. He dropped a cardboard cylinder into Mr.
Clifford Brown's mailbox and began to sort out my letters.

"Far as that goes, I guess Mis' Hill don't miss much of what goes on
around here. When she hears a good bit of tattle, she has her husband
hitch up, and she goes drivin' all day. Ain't a house she knows that
don't get to hear the whole yarn! You know Mis' Royal Hill? Mis' Vere
gets butter and cheese from her. Might ask her!"

I thanked him and drove on.

Mrs. Hill, garrulous wife of the farmer who owned the place next to
ours, was on her porch when I came to a halt before the house. She
granted me more interest than the other natives upon whom I had called
that morning; inviting me into her parlor to "set," when she had
identified me. But she knew nothing of the object of my quest.

"I guessed you must be the new owner up to the Michell place," she
observed, her beady, faded brown eyes busy with my appearance, picking
up details in avid, darting little glances suggestive of a bird pecking
crumbs. "Cliff Brown said a lame feller had bought it. I don't see as
that little limp cripples you much, the way you can rampus 'round in
that fast automobile of yours! Now, I'm perfectly sound, and I wouldn't
be paid to drive the thing. You'd ought to get the other fellow to run
it for you; the handsome one. I guess you like to do it, though? Writer,
ain't you? Books or newspapers?"

I rallied my scattered faculties to answer the machine-gun attack.

"Music?" she echoed, her narrow, sun-dried face wrinkling into new lines
of inquisitiveness. "They said you had a piano in your bedroom, but I
thought they were just foolin' me! Seems I never heard of havin' a piano
upstairs. Most folks like to show 'em off in the parlor. Must be kind of
funny, takin' your company upstairs to play for 'em. But then it's kind
of a funny thing for a man to take to, anyhow! I got a niece ten years
old next August who can play piano so good there don't seem anythin'
left to learn her, so----! But there ain't no use of you drivin' 'round
here lookin' for a fair-headed girl, Mr