“You like to find a reason for everything, Barbara,” said Lavinia Cortright, after a long pause; “can you tell me exactly why the country hereabout seems so desolate and impossible? It has all the colour and atmosphere of the perfect autumn landscape, and yet the idea of living here would be appalling.” I had been thinking the same thing as Lavinia spoke; there was something in the very wind that blew over the ruined factory settlement that was deterrent; funerals might take place there, but how could enough impetus ever exist to cause weddings or christenings? At this moment the door of a small building, the schoolhouse at the cross-roads immediately below, opened, and a dozen or more children rushed out pell-mell, followed by the slim form of a young woman, evidently the teacher, who closed the door and prepared to take a cross cut through the fields, the worn track leading up to the pasture bars close to where we were sitting. No bell, no whistle, no exodus of labourers from the fields to mark the noon hour, the impulsive rush of childhood breaking bounds was the only clock. The woman disappeared in a dip of the land, and then presently her head emerged from it and the whole figure appeared again walking between the deep green bayberry bushes that make the dark patches in the waste hillside fields. She walked without either energy or fatigue, looking neither to the right nor left; the freckled face, tending to thinness, interested me from the first glance, for though it wore very little expression, it was in no wise vacant; the chin was firm, and there was a good space between the eyes, which opened wide and had none of the squinting shrewdness I have met with in my wanderings with father among remote rural communities. It was an unawakened face, and as I began to wonder what could ever come to give it the vital touch, she reached the bars and seeing us for the first time, paused, scrutinized us slowly, and then said with a tinge of irritation in the tone:— “I wish you wouldn’t spoil those grapes, I’m going to spice them on Saturday. I should have done it last week, but they are always better for a touch of frost.” I straightway disentangled myself from the vine with a guilty feeling, and murmured the usual apology of the roadside depredators; that is, when they deign to make excuses, about the grapes being wild and not knowing that they belonged to any one, but my words fell upon deaf ears. “There were full ten pounds of grapes here this morning, but with what you’ve eaten and more that you’ve shaken off, there isn’t more than six pounds left. How came you up here, anyhow? Nobody ever passes this way; even the mail-man turns ’round below at four corners. I’m Randy Banks.”