n]

I walked slowly down the "big road" that Sunday afternoon--slowly, as
befitted the scene and the season; for who would hurry over the path
that summer has prepared for the feet of earth's tired pilgrims? It
was the middle of June, and Nature lay a vision of beauty in her
vesture of flowers, leaves, and blossoming grasses. The sandy road was
a pleasant walking-place; and if one tired of that, the short, thick
grass on either side held a fairy path fragrant with pennyroyal, that
most virtuous of herbs. A tall hedge of Osage orange bordered each
side of the road, shading the traveler from the heat of the sun, and
furnishing a nesting-place for numberless small birds that twittered
and chirped their joy in life and love and June. Occasionally a gap in
the foliage revealed the placid beauty of corn, oats, and clover,
stretching in broad expanse to the distant purple woods, with here and
there a field of the cloth of gold--the fast-ripening wheat that
waited the hand of the mower. Not only is it the traveler's manifest
duty to walk slowly in the midst of such surroundings, but he will do
well if now and then he sits down and dreams.

As I made the turn in the road and drew near Aunt Jane's house, I
heard her voice, a high, sweet, quavering treble, like the notes of an
ancient harpsichord. She was singing a hymn that suited the day and
the hour:

"Welcome, sweet day of rest,
That saw the Lord arise,
Welcome to this reviving breast,
And these rejoicing eyes."

Mingling with the song I could hear the creak of her old
splint-bottomed chair as she rocked gently to and fro. Song and creak
ceased at once when she caught sight of me, and before I had opened
the gate she was hospitably placing another chair on the porch and
smiling a welcome.

"Come in, child, and set down," she exclaimed, moving the rocker so
that I might have a good view of the bit of landscape that she knew I
loved to look at.

"Pennyroy'l! Now, child, how did you know I love to smell that?" She
crushed the bunch in her withered hands, buried her face in it and sat
for a moment with closed eyes. "Lord! Lord!" she exclaimed, with
deep-drawn breath, "if I could jest tell how that makes me feel! I
been smellin' pennyroy'l all my life, and now, when I get hold of a
piece of it, sometimes it makes me feel like a little child, and then
again it brings up the time when I was a gyirl, and if I was to keep
on settin' here and rubbin' this