“What if ’tis?” growled the man, defiant and suspicious. “Oh, nothing,” rejoined Miles, taken aback. “Only I rode your mare Jubilee once--” “Dessay,” snapped Abram. He spat on his hands, stooped to the shafts of his barrow, and growled, “Lots o’ lummockses did. Damn ’er hide! Dunno that’s reason to hender a man’s work.” “Or to be uncivil,” Miles retorted stiffly, taking a leaf from his grandfather’s book of pride. But it was with a chuckle that he passed on, and swung into the path along the shore. It was a bright Saturday morning of late September. Across the border a thin haze of forest fires, from “back lots” far behind the river hills, veiled the high, resolute contours of the American shore; but in all other quarters the air shone clear and buoyant, mellow but cordial, like the sweetness of a frosty apple. Goldenrod along his path had ripened to a higher, drier yellow; seaweed on the rocks below--that turned the broad flats into a “rookery” of shaggy forms, petrified in the act of basking--seemed to have lost the greenish tinge from its leathern brown; ahead, down the sparkling vista of the river, the bay, by a sleight of mirage, raised islands a hair’s-breadth above the horizon, till beneath them sea and sky joined with that pale, stretched continuity seen in downward-parting drops. A world unclouded and untroubled: yet the sky held the growing whiteness that foreruns autumnal wind, and a loon, winging high with bedlam laughter, steered his flight by the flight of an unrisen gale. Miles loitered, yet was busy rather with thought than sight. What could bring Abram to Kilmarnock? The fat postmaster would have not only mentioned a “show,” but discussed it tediously; where, then, were Terry and Jubilee, and Madge the Seeress, and the little barefoot girl? His sudden sharp curiosity, above all on this last head, astonished him. Why should he care?--yet he continued to speculate. His path skirted among sweet-fern, mullein, and pink granite. The little fir promontory, roughly double-serrate like the edge of an elm leaf, suddenly hid the upper lighthouse, for shore and path bent sharp into Alward’s Cove. Here a deserted house stood at the grassy mouth of an ancient watercourse; and behind it, a grove of slender white birches had already begun to shed yellow leaves, which so carpeted the dark, strait hollow that a sunlight seemed to glow faintly upward. Suddenly Miles saw that new shingles patched the cabin, and that from the chimney curled blue wisps of smoke. A battered “punt” lay hauled above the thin rubbish line of high water. But what most deeply surprised him, the beginnings of a weir straggled down the beach. He laughed aloud. The stakes were freshly driven, but the cedar poles green-coated with many tides; on old material the builder had exerted an inexperience glaring even in these first few yards; and more than all, Alward’s Cove, a narrow cleft half a mile above low water, was for a weir the worst possible situation.