As we stood talking, the young priest of the parish joined our group. He was a German, from Düsseldorf, and his worn face lit up when he found that Colin had been at Düsseldorf and could talk with him about it. As he stood with us there on that bleak upland, he seemed a pathetic, symbolic figure, lonely standard-bearer of the spirit in one of the dreary colonies of that indomitable church that carries her mystic sacraments even into the waste places and borders of the world. The romance of Rome was far away beyond that horizon on which he turned his wistful look; here was its hard work, its daily prose. But he turned proudly to the great pile that loomed over us. We had commented on its size in so remote a parish. "Yes, I am proud of our people," he said. "It is greatly to their credit." One could not help silently wondering that the spiritual needs of this handful of lonely houses should demand so ambitious a structure. But the symbols of the soul can never be too impressive. Then we said good-bye to our friends, and struck out into the morning sunshine, leaving the village of song behind. Yes! in Sheldon Center they sing from morning till night--at grave-making! CHAPTER XI APPLE-LAND It was a spacious morning of windswept sunshine, with a wintry bite in the keen air. Meadow-larks and song-sparrows kept up a faint warbling about us, but the crickets, which yesterday had here and there made a thin music, as of straggling bands of survivors of the Summer, were numbed into silence again. Once or twice we caught sight of the dainty snipe in the meadows, and high over the woods a bird-hawk floated, as by some invisible anchorage, in the sky. It was an austere landscape, grave with elm and ash and pine. For a space, a field of buckwheat standing in ricks struck a smudged negroid note, but there was warmth in the apple orchards which clustered about the scattered houses, with piles of golden pumpkins and red apples under the trees. And is there any form of piled-up wealth, bins of specie at the bank, or mountains of precious stones, rubies and sapphires and carbuncles, as we picture them in the subterranean treasuries of kings, that thrills the imagination with so dream-like a sense of uncounted riches, untold gold, as such natural bullion of the earth; pyramids of apples lighting up dark orchards, great plums lying in heaps of careless purple, corridors hung with fabulous bunches of grapes, or billowy mounds of yellow grain--the treasuries of Pomona and Vertumnus? Such treasuries, in the markets of this world, are worth only a modest so-much-a-bushel, yet I think I should actually feel myself richer with a barrel of apples than with a barrel of money. From a corn-growing country, we were evidently passing into a country whose beautiful business was apples. Orchards began more or less to line the road, and wagons with those same apple-barrels became a feature of the highway.