The invitation was pleasant enough to Seth, but he looked down deprecatingly at his rough chore clothes, and wondered whether he ought to accept it or not. “Why, Seth, the _idea_ of standing on ceremony with _me!_ As if we hadn’t played together here as children--to say nothing of my being your sister now!” They had started now toward the orchard, and she continued:-- “Do you know, it seems as if I didn’t know anybody here but you--and even you almost make a stranger out of me. Poor Uncle Lemuel, he is so broken-down that he scarcely remembers me, and of course your Aunt and I couldn’t be expected to get very intimate--you remember our dispute? Then John, he’s very pleasant, and all that, but he isn’t at all like the John I used to look up to so, the summer I was here. But you--you have hardly changed a bit. Of course,” she made haste to add, for Seth’s face did not reflect unalloyed gratification at this, “you have grown manly and big, and all that, but you haven’t changed in your expression or manner. It’s almost ten years--and I should have known you anywhere. But John _has_ changed--he’s more like a city man, or rather a villager, a compromise between city and country.” “Yes, I’m a countryman through and through, I suppose,” said Seth, with something very like a sigh. “John has seen a good deal of the world they tell me, and been on papers in large cities. I wonder how he can content himself with that little weekly in Thessaly after that.” “I don’t think John has much ambition,” answered Seth, meditatively. “He doesn’t seem to care much how things go, if he only has the chance to say what he wants to say in print. It doesn’t make any difference to him, apparently, whether all New York State reads what he writes, or only thirty or forty fellows in Dearborn County--he’s just as well satisfied. And yet he’s a very bright man, too. He might have gone to the Assembly last fall, if he could have bid against Elhanan Pratt. He _will_ go sometime, probably.” “Why, do you have an auction here for the Assembly?” “Oh, no, but the man who’s willing to pay a big assessment into the campaign fund can generally shut a poor candidate out John didn’t seem to mind much about being frozen out though--not half so much as I did, for him. Everybody in Thessaly knows him and likes him and calls him ‘John,’ and that seems to be the height of his ambition. I can’t imagine a man of his abilities being satisfied with so limited a horizon.” “And, you, Seth, what is your horizon like?” asked Isabel. They had entered the orchard path, now, and the apple blossoms close above them filled the May morning air with that sweet spring perfume which seems to tell of growth, harvest, the fruition of hope. “Oh, I’m picked out to be a countryman all the days of my life I suppose.” There was the sigh again, and a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as well.