how many times she had asked him not to say "these here." Of course he couldn't tell her.

Dinner over, it appeared that Winona would take Merle with her to call upon poor old Mrs. Dodwell, who had been bedridden for twenty years, but was so patient with it all. She loved to have Merle sit by her bedside of a Sunday and tell of the morning's sermon. They would also take her a custard. The Wilbur twin was not invited upon this excursion, but his father winked at him when it was mentioned and he was happy. He could in no manner have edified the afflicted Mrs. Dodwell, and the wink meant that he would go with his father for a walk over the hills—perhaps to the gypsy camp. So he winked back at his father, being no longer in Sunday-school, and was impatient to be off.

In the little house he watched from a window until Winona and Merle had gone on their errand of mercy—Merle carrying nicely the bowl of custard swathed in a napkin—and thereupon heartily divested himself of shoes and stockings. Winona, for some reason she could never make apparent to him, believed that boys could not decently go barefoot on the Lord's Day. He did not wish to affront her, but neither would he wear shoes and stockings with no one to make him. His bare feet rejoiced at the cool touch of the grass as he waited in the front yard for his father. He would have liked to change his Sunday clothes for the old ones of a better feel, but this even he felt would be going too far. You had to draw the line somewhere.

His father came out, lighting his calabash pipe. He wore a tweed cap now in place of the formal derby, but he was otherwise attired as on the previous evening, in the blue coal and vivid waistcoat, the inferior trousers, and the undesirable shoes. As they went down the street under shading elms the dog, Frank, capered at the end of his taut leash.

They went up Fair Street to reach the wooded hills beyond the town. The street was still and vacant. The neat white houses with green blinds set back in their flowered yards would be at this hour sheltering people who had eaten heavily of chicken for dinner and now dozed away its benign effects. Even song birds had stilled their pipings, and made but brief flights through the sultry air.

Dave Cowan sauntered through the silence in a glow of genial tolerance for the small town, for Dave knew cities. In Newbern he was but a merry transient; indeed, in all those strange cities he went off to he was but a transient. So frequent his 

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