the light wind that whispered over the snowy stretches of rolling meadowlands. For a long time Terry stood facing toward the invisible village, his face moody and inscrutable. As the sound of the bells died away he shook off the spell with conscious, humorous effort and picking up his rifle and the fox he went into the thicket to secure and adjust his snowshoes.

Ignoring paths and sleighroads he made his way toward the town. The crisp pine-laden air charged his muscles with exuberant excess of the fine energy of youth and he made his way swiftly across the sparkling snow that blanketed the gentle landscape, through the thickets of evergreens and across the tiny, ice-edged creeks that flowed in swift escape from winter's frozen grip.

Keen-eyed, he stopped a moment in study of a group of pheasants that huddled in a clump of underbrush.[Pg 3] They played possum till he passed on. A rabbit, reared up in nervous-nosed inquiry, watched him furtively as he approached the rock behind which it had vainly sought concealment. Terry laughed at its ridiculous plight.

[Pg 3]

"You'd better improve your strategy, you young scamp, or you'll wind up in the pot of some one who hunts rabbits!"

He watched its jumpy flight into a distant copse of young pines, then went on swiftly. In an hour he paused at the top of a last steep grade. Lake Champlain stretched her flat-frozen bosom to the north and south of him. The more level timbered areas of the opposite shore were broken here and there by clearings in which white farm houses and red barns nestled like doll houses.

At the foot of the slope directly beneath him a village lay primly along the lake shore. It was a square-built town, its limits almost rectangular, its breadth and width checkered into exact squares by wide, straight streets. It was an old town: a score of its flat-roofed structures had been built while the Mohawks still guarded the Western Gate of the Long House, and many of the great, old-fashioned homes had stood when Ethan Allen strutted through its streets.

It was not a snug little town, there was no air of hospitality to encourage strangers to tarry within its gates, but seemed to promise "value received" for any who came, paid their way and attended strictly to their own affairs.

Thus Terry saw the town in which he had been[Pg 4] born and had spent all of his twenty-six years except the four at Princeton. He tarried, his eyes fixed upon the cemetery which 

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