One exception there was. We drew up one afternoon by a well-kept little house with a good English name on the post-box, and, as usual, I held the reins while Jonathan went up to the side door to make inquiries. After he had started up the path I saw, from my vantage-point, the lady of the farm returning from her "garden patch," and my heart went out in pity to Jonathan. If I could have called him back I would have done so, merely on the testimony of the lady's gait and figure. I had never fully realized how expressive these could be. Her hips, her shoulders, the set of her head, the way she planted her feet on the uneven flagging-stones of the path, each heavy line and each sodden motion, bespoke inhospitality, intolerance, impenetrable disapproval of everything unfamiliar. I watched Jonathan turn back from the door at the sound of her steps, and in the short colloquy that followed, though I could hear nothing, I could see those hips and shoulders settling themselves yet more decisively, while Jonathan's attitude grew more studiously courteous. But when he had lifted his hat again and turned from that monument of immobile unpleasantness I saw his face relax into lines, partly of amusement, partly of chagrin; and as he took his seat beside me and drove on, he murmured snatches of quotation--"No; couldn't possibly," "No; don't know anybody that could," "No; never did such a thing," "No; the people in the next house've just had a funeral; sure _they_ couldn't"; and finally he broke into a chuckle as he quoted, "Well, there _is_ some folks about two mile down might mebbe take ye; they does sometimes harbor peddlers 'n' such like." Jonathan was hardly willing to try again so near by; he regarded the whole neighborhood as tainted. Yet it was little more than two miles beyond, on that same afternoon, that we found lodgings with the most delightful, the most hospitable friends of all--for friends they became, taking us into their circle as if we belonged to it by right of birth, coddling us as one ought never to expect to be coddled save by one's own mother or grandmother.