"Well, bless Bob! Do tell!" was all the old man had time to ejaculate, as they came to the mouth of the lane, bumpy in dry weather and muddy in wet, and he must leave the swiftly moving car and again trust to his old limbs to carry him on his way. His step was lighter, however, as he was the bearer of good tidings to all the white folks at Mr. Big Josh's. Miss Ann Peyton was not coming, but was making a visit at Buck Hill. He was full of other news, too, but was not quite sure whether it would be so welcome to the family. "Not that she ain't mo' likelier than mos' er the young genderation," he muttered. Judith had a slap-dash impressionistic manner of cooking all her own, following no rules or recipes, but with an unerring instinct that produced results. She said she cooked by ear. Whatever her method, the motormen were vastly pleased with the hot suppers she brought them and the word was passed that the pretty red-headed girl at the last stop before you got to Ryeville would furnish a basket supper at a reasonable figure and soon almost every man on the line was eager to become one of her customers. The first supper was difficult because she was determined to have it absolutely perfect, and her mother would insist upon getting in her way, offering various suggestions that might save a tenth of a cent. "I tell you, Mumsy, I am not saving but making. Please sit down in this chair by the table, while I behave like the man in the lunatic asylum who thought he was a steam engine. I'm afraid I might get off the track and run over you. If you just stay still in one spot I'll get through. I can't go over you, I can't go around you and I can't go under you. "There's the whistle blowing for two stops before ours and I'm ready. Hurrah for a fortune, Mumsy!" and with a kiss Judith was off, bearing a basket in one hand and a tin cooler of buttermilk in the other. The Bucks' farm was a triangle, bounded on two sides by converging roads and the other by the pasture lands of Buck Hill. The trolley line skirted the back of the farm, but turned sharply toward Ryeville before reaching the corner where the two roads met. The track curved about five hundred feet beyond the location of the stop where Judith had promised to meet the car with the suppers. There was a short cut from the rear of the house and Judith always took short cuts. Through the orchard, down the hill, across a stream, up the hill, skirting a blackberry thicket, through a grove of beeches, dark and peaceful with lengthening shadows falling on mossy banks, went the girl. She stopped a moment in the grove and looked out across the fertile country--everywhere more fertile than the Buck farm but nowhere more beautiful, she thought.