you
will take a good drink."

"I'm immensely grateful, Rao Sahib. I believe you've saved my life. How
did Hitchcock--"

"Oho! His hair was upon end. He rode to me in the middle of the night
and woke me up in the arms of Morpheus. I was most truly concerned,
Finlinson, so I came too. My head-priest he is very angry just now. We
will go quick, Mister Hitchcock. I am due to attend at twelve forty-five
in the state temple, where we sanctify some new idol. If not so I
would have asked you to spend the day with me. They are dam-bore, these
religious ceremonies, Finlinson, eh?"

Peroo, well known to the crew, had possessed himself of the inlaid
wheel, and was taking the launch craftily up-stream. But while he
steered he was, in his mind, handling two feet of partially untwisted
wire-rope; and the back upon which he beat was the back of his guru.

A WALKING DELEGATE

According to the custom of Vermont, Sunday afternoon is salting-time on
the farm, and, unless something very important happens, we attend to the
salting ourselves. Dave and Pete, the red oxen, are treated first; they
stay in the home meadow ready for work on Monday. Then come the cows,
with Pan, the calf, who should have been turned into veal long ago, but
survived on account of his manners; and lastly the horses, scattered
through the seventy acres of the Back Pasture.

You must go down by the brook that feeds the clicking, bubbling
water-ram; up through the sugar-bush, where the young maple undergrowth
closes round you like a shallow sea; next follow the faint line of an
old county-road running past two green hollows fringed with wild rose
that mark the cellars of two ruined houses; then by Lost Orchard, where
nobody ever comes except in cider-time; then across another brook, and
so into the Back Pasture. Half of it is pine and hemlock and Spruce,
with sumach and little juniper bushes, and the other half is grey rock
and boulder and moss, with green streaks of brake and swamp; but the
horses like it well enough--our own, and the others that are turned
down there to feed at fifty cents a week. Most people walk to the Back
Pasture, and find it very rough work; but one can get there in a buggy,
if the horse knows what is expected of him. The safest conveyance is our
coupe. This began life as a buckboard, and we bought it for five dollars
from a sorrowful man who had no other sort of possessions; and the seat
came off one night when we were turning a c