“Where did you say you aimed to go?” he asked when they were on the road again, and she answered, “Spring Run Valley.” Then he told her of the origin of the name, she having asked. “Spring Run is a creek that rises in a spring off a way to the north there.” He told the news of the countryside, of the dead, the sick, the new-born, the lucky. Along the roadside men were clearing the ditches, shoveling out drains for the roadway, and over the tops of the hills some crows were flying. The winter had blown the last leaf from every bush and every vine and the earth stood ready to be remade, the streams running cold under the little bridges, the water quick and yellow. The truck ran swiftly, and there were few sales made, for the people were busy with other matters, with the plant beds, the hen-houses, the early gardening or fencing. They would wave the liniment-man away with a greeting. “You know somebody in Spring Valley?” he asked. She did not know what she would say to that, and she waited for a reply to find its way to her mouth, her humor that of a bird waiting for its song. She saw her strange happiness going its unknown ways and she looked from afar, quaintly amused, as if place were a humorous adjunct to being, for if one is happy in being alive he has to have a place to be happy in. They could never take that away from happiness in being. That control of places kept in the hands of men, certain men, this seemed exquisitely droll. “Miss Hettie, she up and married awhile back, took and married and went off right in the middle of the school. They haven’t got a teacher yet to the best of my belief and knowledge. Doc Bradley said to me they would be right put-to to find one so late in the term.” Bradley was the school trustee for the district, and the appointment of the teacher was his duty, he said. She was weary in body, aching from the long ride, and a vertigo seized her now and then, induced by the unaccustomed motion of the truck and the swift passage, but her pleasure ran still with the slipping countryside as it opened before her and with the flocking of the crows as they made off toward some farther hill. She had waited for her replies as a bird might wait, but finally she made known her mission as it appeared to her. She would ask to be allowed to teach the Spring Run Valley school for the three months remaining. “So that’s were you’re bound for,” he said. “Well I vum! They’ll be right glad to get you, that I know.” He would let her down at Dr. Bradley’s house, he said. “I’m bound straight for that very place.” Then he took a package from his coat pocket and said that it was a snack of lunch his wife always wrapped up for him, that he never could tell where he would be for his dinner and she always tied him up a little snack to be on the safe side.