on in the church." His old eyes began to
twinkle. "Great changes can take place in a man's habits once you
hitch him up with apron strings. His wife has never thought so much of
Loraine. And now he doesn't think so much of me." He chuckled. "We
were raised together, and I have a good memory." He opened the door
and walked slowly toward the front of the store. It was empty of
customers. A clerk stood leaning idly across a glass counter of
notions looking into the street. Uncle Buzz proceeded calmly on,
giving the clerk a pleasant nod. "She came from a farm back in the
county. They say she had never seen a railroad until she was
twenty-one years old."

The clerk inspected Joe thoroughly and critically and made no sign of
having heard anything. And still Joe felt a bit dubious; indiscretion
is like other normal weapons: it kills when one doesn't know it is
loaded.

But Mr. Mosby was in rising spirits. They emerged to the street and
turned the corner into the less populous thoroughfare, known commonly
throughout Bloomfield as Pearl Street, and there they came upon Uncle
Buzz's horse and buggy, standing as if carved from one and the same
block of immutable immobility. Even the flies found little of
excitement in lighting about the front section of the combination, and
only one or two were buzzing about in the general neighbourhood in a
dispirited manner.

The horse opened his eyes and lifted one ear as Uncle Buzz climbed in
the buggy and took up the lines. But being complacent and particularly
indisposed to anything as much like effort as resistance, the starting
was quite without ceremony.

Eventually, and not too much so, they left the city streets, and soon
were jogging down a winding little lane of the softest, yellowest
earth imaginable. On either side, between the edge of the roadside and
the snake rail fence, was a little bank all a-tangle with blackberry
bushes, and here and there, with its roots protruding out into space,
a gaunt and bare thorn tree or an occasional walnut thrusting its
branches over the road. Beyond, the fields lay in cool, serrated rows,
deep brown and freshly fragrant. The woodland which hung about in the
background beyond the fields would occasionally sweep down and cross
the road, and then would come a stretch of checkered shade on the
yellow earth, and the lifting, expectant sound of high wind in top
branches. And sometimes, in the heart of such an arm of woodland, the
old horse's hoofs