idea of its long, irregular extent.

Soon they came to the removed and rebuilt village of West Hurley near the shore of the reservoir. Close by, under the water as Tom knew, were the bones of the old dead village, traces of streets, odds and ends of demolished masonry, submerged memorials of the settlement which had once been there.

There was not much to the new village; it must have lost something in the process of removal and revival of the community life. Some of its simple buildings seemed comparatively new. The visitors looked in vain for any signs of actual reconstruction.

“Do you know,” mused Brent in his slow, dry way, “I don’t know why a reconstructed village shouldn’t be just as good as a new one—same as an automobile or a typewriter. I’d kind of like to get a squint under the water though. What do you suppose we’d see?”

“If we were here during a drought,” said Tom, “we’d see things on the sloping shore, that’s what Pop Dyker said.”

“Old village sort of pokes its nose up, hey?”

“Sort of like a ghost,” Tom said.

“Comes up for air,” said Brent. “Well, let’s move along. I guess the new village won’t get its feet wet, it seems to be well back.”

They drove along the road a little farther and up toward Woodstock, which is the habitat of a queer race of poets and artists, and so on in a northeasterly direction till they came to Saugerties and found themselves back on the road which borders the lordly Hudson.

At Catskill they paused for an inspection of the Goodfellow, Brent showing his usual amiable and whimsically passive interest at the prospect of acquaintance with this beauteous damsel of poor Tom’s heart.

Tom was disappointed to find that his friend, the caretaker, had gone away and was not expected to return till late in the autumn. No one seemed to have the boat in charge and Tom (lacking Hervey Willetts’ aggressive genius) was disinclined to venture upon that hallowed deck without permission. Nor was there a rowboat handy in which to circumnavigate the trim little cruiser and view it at close range.

So they contented themselves with a long distance inspection from the shore. The Goodfellow, in Tom’s view, seemed rather the worse for her long period at anchor. She looked neglected. Her white sides were dirty and there was, even from the distant shore, 

 Prev. P 27/96 next