eat."

He guided Pegasus to one side of the road, and then showed me how
to light the swinging lamp that hung under the skylight. "No use
to light the stove on a lovely evening like this," he said. "I'll
collect some sticks and we can cook outside. You get out your basket
of grub and I'll make a fire." He unhitched Pegasus, tied her to a
tree, and gave her a nose bag of oats. Then he rooted around for
some twigs and had a fire going in a jiffy. In five minutes I had
bacon and scrambled eggs sizzling in a frying pan, and he had
brought out a pail of water from the cooler under the bunk, and was
making tea.

I never enjoyed a picnic so much! It was a perfect autumn evening,
windless and frosty, with a dead black sky and a tiny rim of new
moon like a thumb-nail paring. We had our eggs and bacon, washed
down with tea and condensed milk, and followed by bread and jam.
The little fire burned blue and cozy, and we sat on each side of it
while Bock scoured the pan and ate the crusts.

"This your own bread, Miss McGill?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "I was calculating the other day that I've baked more
than 400 loaves a year for the last fifteen years. That's more than
6,000 loaves of bread. They can put that on my tombstone."

"The art of baking bread is as transcendent a mystery as the art of
making sonnets," said Redbeard. "And then your hot biscuits--they
might be counted as shorter lyrics, I suppose--triolets perhaps.
That makes quite an anthology, or a doxology, if you prefer it."