Turning quickly, I saw the dwarfed figure of a very old man, with a hunched back, who was dragging a load of pine knots out of the woods. Though he was so stooped that his head reached scarcely higher than my wheel, he appeared to possess unusual vigour for one of his age and infirmities. He was dressed in a rough overcoat of some wood brown shade, beneath which I could see his overalls of blue jeans. Under a thatch of grizzled hair his shrewd little eyes twinkled cunningly, and his bristly chin jutted so far forward that it barely escaped the descending curve of his nose. I remember thinking that he could not be far from a hundred; his skin was so wrinkled and weather-beaten that, at a distance, I had mistaken him for a negro. I bowed politely. “Thank you, but I am going to Jordan’s End,” I replied. He cackled softly. “Then you take the bad road. Thar’s Jur’dn’s turnout.” He pointed to the sunken trail, deep in mud, on the right. “An’ if you ain’t objectin’ to a little comp’ny, I’d be obleeged if you’d give me a lift. I’m bound thar on my own o’ count, an’ it’s a long ways to tote these here lightwood knots.” While I drew back my robe and made room for him, I watched him heave the load of resinous pine into the buggy, and then scramble with agility to his place at my side. “My name is Peterkin,” he remarked by way of introduction. “They call me Father Peterkin along o’ the gran’child’en.” He was a garrulous soul, I suspected, and would not be averse to imparting the information I wanted. “There’s not much travel this way,” I began, as we turned out of the cleared space into the deep tunnel of the trees. Immediately the twilight enveloped us, though now and then the dusky glow in the sky was still visible. The air was sharp with the tang of autumn; with the effluvium of rotting leaves, the drift of wood smoke, the ripe flavour of crushed apples. “Thar’s nary a stranger, thoughten he was a doctor, been to Jur’dn’s End as fur back as I kin recollect. Ain’t you the new doctor?” “Yes, I am the doctor.” I glanced down at the gnomelike shape in the wood brown overcoat. “Is it much farther?” “Naw, suh, we’re all but thar jest as soon as we come out of Whitten woods.” “If the road is so little travelled, how do you happen to be going there?”