This is a lamb of an island. The land lifts away to low hills and the village has splashed a little way up on the sides. A curtain of filmy fog has just risen clear of the treetops and everything is graciously gray. No one ever comes so late in the season and this awful, little hotel is closing,--it ought to be closed and sealed forever. Everything about the tiny town is refreshing. A citizen finished up a game of checkers before he went down to consider the case of my trunk. Then it took him some time to wake up his horse, which did a bewildered Lady Macbeth up the street. I was walking beside, and suddenly a roly-poly puppy slipped away from a boy and ran straight under the clumsy hoofs.... You never heard such ki-yi's. You'd think he was being vivisected. There was a shrieking streak of white and he disappeared under a culvert. The old mare stopped, wide-awake and horror-stricken, and the boy--a pitiful little person with his head held tautly back, almost a hunchback--and the driver and I flew to the spot and all the village Hectors laid their helmets by and gave themselves to the hour. The sweetest old man in rusty black laid right down flat on his stomach and peeked into the dusty tunnel, calling, "Come, pup! Come, pup! Come, _dear_!" But the yammerings went on. Finally the blacksmith next door put down a pink horseshoe and came out. I'm much obliged for blacksmiths nowadays, aren't you, Michael Daragh? I love their leaping fires and their worn, leather aprons and their dim, rich Flemish interiors,--in our soft world of push buttons. This one said, "Was they a string around his neck, Dan'l?" Then he went back into his shop and returned with a long stick with a bent nail in the end and began to fish absorbedly into the culvert. Presently a wild crescendo of shrieks announced his catch. I shut my eyes and covered my ears and when I looked again he was hauling out a quivering lump of baby dog. He felt him all over with grimy, gentle fingers and "allowed they warn't nothin' broke ... just skairt him outer a year's growth," handed him back to the boy and went again to his horseshoe. The people pressed close with little clucks of sympathy and made the nicest fuss about it, and the boy turned out to be Daniel Gillespie and I went right on home with him and arranged to move there to-morrow--his mother desiring a day in which to "red up" for me. I wanted to go at once--I'm so afraid this hotel might close with a snap, with me on the inside. At noon to-day I did not crave any of the ready-to-wear effects on the zebra menu card and asked the aloof young lady under the pompadour how long the chops would take. "'Bout fifteen minutes." "Very well, then," I said, "I'll take the chops." "_Ain't_ any." Don't you adore that, Michael Daragh?