"Well, gosh!" said Smith, with feeling.

Winterbottom Road unrolled itself into a white length of half-laid dust,
between blown, sweet-smelling bay-clumps and boulder-filled meadows.

"Is it being nice?" Kirk asked, for the twentieth time since they had
left the train for the trolley-car.

Felicia had been thanking fortune that she'd remembered to stop at the
Asquam Market and lay in a few provisions. She woke from calculations of
how many meals her family could make of the supplies she had bought,
and looked about.

"We're near the bay," she said; "that is you can see little silvery
flashes of it between trees. They're pointy trees--junipers, I think and
there are a lot of rocks in the fields, and wild-flowers. Nothing like
any place you've ever been in--wild, and salty, and--yes, quite nice."

They passed several low, sturdy farm-houses, and one or two boarded-up
summer cottages; then two white chimneys showed above a dark green
tumble of trees, and the ancient Hopkins pointed with his whip saying:

"Ther' you be. Kind o' dull this time year, I guess; but my! Asquam's
real uppy, come summer--machines a-goin', an' city folks an' such.
Reckon I'll leave you at the gate where I kin turn good."

The flap-flop of the horse's hoofs died on Winterbottom Road, and no
sound came but the wind sighing in old apple-boughs, and from somewhere
the melancholy creaking of a swinging shutter. The gate-way was grown
about with grass; Ken crushed it as he forced open the gate, and the