Leaving Portland, her great pack bulging with her wares, she would doubtless take the road to Brunswick, the seat of Bowdoin College, that venerable institution which had been the Alma Mater alike of Mr. Longfellow and of Father Wescott. From thence she would follow the coast, passing through Wiscasset, which held the oldest deed in America in its courthouse, through the friendly towns of Newcastle and Damariscotta, through Belfast and Searsport, once famous for their sea captains and for their gracious, white-winged clippers. The roads that she would travel would be like those they knew--roads that climbed rocky, fir-clad hills and at their summits gave one far-reaching stretches of sea with surf-swept islands and towering white lighthouses; lonely by-roads that led to scraggly farms and gray farmhouses, where lived people who fought a losing fight against the barren land; elm-shaded village roads bordered by green-shuttered houses and by white gates like their own. She would cross the wide Penobscot where it narrowed enough to encourage a ferry, and, passing through Bucksport with its gray fort and old graveyard, would come by easy stages over dark, tumbling hills, on which great shadows alternately marched and rested, to their own village. “Only you can never be quite sure,” said Father Wescott, forsaking P. H. Sheridan, “that she won’t come through Castine. With summer visitors there, she ought to sell a lot of that hand-stuff.” Then Mary Christmas’ route must be retraced just in case she did choose Castine; and they continued to bend over the map until the sharp, warm smell of burned pop-corn arrested their attention. “Dear me, boys!” cried Mrs. Wescott. “Can’t you manage just one popperful without so many old maids and burned ones?” Mr. Wescott said nothing, but the face that he again raised from P. H. Sheridan was mildly remonstrant. He was what people called in the nineties “a great hand” for hot buttered pop-corn. At half-past eight, filled with pop-corn and a drowsy content, they went to bed to dream of Mary Christmas, while the bitterness of the cold made a solitude of the village, and the lighted windows, one by one, faded into the darkness without.