In the dusk before the house door, he had looked at her once, his eyes pointed with some distress. “I saw you the day you came here, in the wagon with the peddler,” he said. His face had been in that moment pointed, like the face of a fox, drawn to a sharp focus by its troubled interval, “I saw you the day you came here.” * * * * * “Now I’ll tell you-all what my idea is about a sugar-cured ham. Meat, now, ought to be allowed to take salt a day and a half for every pound in the piece. A ham weighen eighteen pounds ought to stay in the salt twenty-seven days. Twenty pounds, if your ham weighs, then thirty days in the salt ...” The refrains hung over the summer country and settled to the distant groves of locust that grew in the places where the hills crumpled together. The tomato vines in the garden were hanging thick now with great green fruits which Midi, when they were turning toward a pale white for ripening, laid in rows on an outer shelf or on the stringers of the fence where they flushed daily more red. The odors of cooking tomato relishes savored the house and the yard when Midi made ready for the winter. Lucian West took three of his sugar-cured hams from the luscious, feathery dark of his meat house where they had ripened, and sold them to someone in the town. In him, Caleb, there was a sense of the whole country, of the rolling farms as owned up and down the watercourses and farther, including the town, Anneville and beyond, other towns, Lester, Quincy, all the reach of the entire region. With a gesture he included all, fearless, comprehending, or he spoke of the people of Anneville, knowing them, of the history of the place and how each street was named, Hill Street, Jackson, Simon, Tucker Lane, Crabtree Lane.... The buying of seeds and the summer faced toward the new year.... I see where I can get.... Frost-proof cabbage.... Bermuda onion plants.... Unhulled white-blossom sweet clover, six dollars.... It was still summer, the nightjars crying in the sky, the fireflies making jeweled streaks in the dark, moving upward. Caleb’s voice, saying man looks forward toward a city, always looks forward to a city, a place, streets of gold, jasper walls, but looks backward to a garden, Eden. “Looken back he sees a garden. Well?...” “It’s been about twelve years since the first automobiles came into this country,” Lucian West said. “Fully twelve, and look how many people still hold a prejudice against ...” “Hardly twelve, I’d say, although I don’t exactly recollect.” “It’s been twelve if it’s been a day, and look how headstrong some keep....”