Every morning he walked briskly over the long mile of road, shaded with wine-glass elms, slashed with vistas of pasture, pond, and brook which lay between Blue Meadows and the Quinanog post-office. When he had inquired for his mail--usually he had none--he strolled over to the general store and made his few simple purchases. He had followed this routine for ten days before it occurred to him that he had not seen a newspaper since he settled himself at Blue Meadows. "I'll let it go that way, I guess," he said to himself. He noticed at first with a little embarrassment and then with amusement that the groups in the post-office waiting for mail, the customers at the general store, were all quietly watching him. And one morning this floated to him from behind a pile of cracker boxes: "He's the nut that's taken the Murray place. Lives all alone--batching it. Some sort of highbrow." Gradually, however, he made acquaintance. Silas Turner, who owned the next farm to Blue Meadows, offered him a ride one morning on the road. Out of a vague conversation on the weather and real estate, Mr. Turner dropped one interesting fact. He had known Lutetia Murray. This revelation kept Lindsay chatting for half an hour while Mr. Turner spilled a mass of uncorrelated details. Such as Miss Murray's neighborliness; the time her cow ran away and Art Curtis brought it back; how Miss Murray admired Mis' Turner's beach plum jelly so much that Mis' Turner always made some extra just for her. As they parted he let fall dispassionately: "She was a mighty handsome woman. Fine figure!" He added, still dispassionately but with an effect somehow of enthusiastic conviction, "She kept her looks to the last day of her life." Useless, all this, for a biography, Lindsay reflected; but it gave him an idea. He bought that day a second-hand bicycle at the Quinanog garage; and thereafter, when the devil of restlessness stirred in his young muscles, he trundled about the countryside in search of those families mentioned in Lutetia's letters. Some were utterly gone from Quinanog, some were not affording, and some added useful detail; as when old Mrs. Apperson produced a dozen letters written from Europe during Lutetia's first trip abroad. "I'd have admired to go to Europe, but it never came so's I could," said Mrs. Apperson. "When Miss Murray went, she wrote me from every city, telling me all about it. I read 'em over a lot--makes me feel as though I'd been there too. And every Decoration Day," she added inconsequently, "I put a bunch of heliotrope on her grave. She just loved the smell of heliotrope."