“But I didn’t; for just then a door overhead was flung open, a white-robed figure appeared on the dim landing above, and a quick loud voice called excitedly,-- “‘Let him in! Let him in! I know him. He has my turtle eggs!’ “And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in anything but an academic gown, came sailing down the stairs. “The maid fled. The great man, his arms extended, laid hold of me with both hands, and dragging me and my precious pail into his study, with a swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the watch in my trembling hands ticked its way to seven--as if nothing unusual were happening to the history of the world.” * * * * * “You were in time then?” I said. “To the tick. There stands my copy of the great book. I am proud of the humble part I had in it.” III THE EDGE OF NIGHT THE EDGE OF NIGHT Beyond the meadow, nearly half a mile away, yet in sight from my window, stands an apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once marked the boundary between the upper and lower pastures. For an apple tree it is unspeakably woeful, and bent, and hoary, and grizzled, with suckers from feet to crown. Unkempt and unesteemed, it attracts only the cattle for its shade, and gives to them alone its gnarly, bitter fruit. But that old tree is hollow, trunk and limb; and if its apples are of Sodom, there is still no tree in the Garden of the Hesperides, none even in my own private Eden, carefully kept as they are, that is half as interesting--I had almost said, as useful. Among the trees of the Lord, an apple tree that bears good Baldwins or greenings or rambos comes first for usefulness; but when one has thirty-five of such trees, which the town has compelled one to trim and scrape and plaster-up and petticoat against the grewsome gypsy moth, then those thirty-five are dull indeed, compared with the untrimmed, unscraped, unplastered, undressed old tramp yonder on the knoll, whose heart is still wide open to the birds and beasts--to every small traveler passing by who needs, perforce, a home, a hiding, or a harbor. When I was a small boy everybody used to put up overnight at grandfather’s--for grandmother’s wit and buckwheat cakes, I think, which were known away down into Cape May County. It was so, too, with grandfather’s wisdom and brooms. The old house sat in behind a grove of pin-oak and pine, a sheltered, sheltering spot, with a peddler’s stall in the barn, a peddler’s place at the table, a peddler’s bed in the herby garret, a boundless, fathomless feather-bed, of a piece with the house and the hospitality. There were larger houses and newer, in the neighborhood; but no other house in all the region, not even the tavern, two miles farther down the Pike, was half as central, or as homelike, or as full of sweet and juicy gossip.