The shape of a hansom clopping through the London fog; a careless laugh floating back on a French boulevard in the hush of a soft, spring night; evening on the Grand Canal with the eternal slap, slap, slap of the water and the memory of a weird song mixed with the musty decay of old palaces; blue-toned Greece where the landscapes were as clear and sharp as far-flung cameos of mountain size; the heat-soaked Holy Land; Sunday morning from the Mount of Olives; breakfast in a Persian camp; noon on a Chinese river; twilight and a Japanese moon riding mystic above eucalyptus trees,—what did the women of such a landlocked little town know of the world’s beauties and its far places? Or the men either? The men! Who was Nathaniel Forge and why should he have written such a poem? She wondered if she was beginning to understand. She had no appetite for dinner—they called it supper up here, she supposed—at least in the dining room where all the first arrivals would leer at her. She went back down to the lobby and approached Pat Whitney, the proprietor. “I wonder if you could assist me,” she said, “in finding a certain type of person in this town for whom I’m looking,” Pat did not remove his two-inch toothpick. He did try to button his vest. “Shoot, lady!” he answered. Madelaine smiled to herself, then “shot.” “I’d like to be directed to some elderly man or woman who has lived a long time here and is acquainted with most of the town’s people. Especially those who lived here about ten years ago. I’m hunting a friend. Yet I don’t want my business made public. I’d prefer some elderly, accommodating man——” “That’s a cinch!” returned Pat. “Skin around the corner and see Uncle Joe Fodder.” “Uncle Joe Fodder?” “Yeah; he runs the livery stable. He knows everybody from way back, who their grandmothers was and what the family et for supper the night they was born.” “That’s very good of you,” returned Madelaine. And she thanked him. “I’m all yours, Missie,” was Pat’s rejoinder. He meant no offense. He dealt so with all the “lady drummers”. Madelaine picked her way into the puddle-dotted, straw-strewn livery yard. A single light burned over the big stable door. Another shone through the murky windowpanes of a tiny office at the left. Three men were in that office with a kindly old fellow who looked exactly as William Cullen Bryant might have looked if William Cullen Bryant had conducted a livery stable in one Vermont community for half a century. He wore a blue gingham shirt, patched trousers and soiled suspenders. But Madelaine liked his eyes. “Mr. Fodder?” the girl asked. Three jaws lowered. Three pairs of eyes stared. Three pairs of front chair legs clumped to the floor. Taking their cue, three specimens of bewhiskered humanity “hoofed along ’bout their business.”