Twenty-five years later I paid Mary and Braddish a pleasant Saturday-to-Monday visit in what foreign country it is not necessary to state. The tiny Skinnertown house of their earlier ambition, with its little yard, had now been succeeded by a great, roomy, rambling habitation, surrounded by thousands of acres sprinkled with flocks of fat, grazing sheep. It was a grand, rolling upland of a country that they had fled to; cool, summer weather all the year round, and no mosquitoes. Hospitable smoke curled from a dozen chimneys; shepherds galloped up on wiry horses and away again; scarlet passion-vines poured over roofs and verandas like cataracts of glory; and there was incessant laughter and chatter of children at play. Of their final flight from the Boole Dogge Farm in my father's boat, across the bay to Long Island in the teeth of the northeaster, I now first heard the details; and of their subsequent hiding among swamps and woods; and how, when it had seemed that they must be captured and Braddish go to jail forever and ever, Mary thought that she could face the separation more cheerfully if she was his wife. And so one rainy night they knocked upon the door of a clergyman, and told him their story. They were starving, it seems, and it was necessary to look about for mercy. And, as luck would have it, the clergyman, an old man, had officiated at the wedding of Mary's parents; and he had had some trouble in his day with the law about a boundary fence, and was down on the law. And he fed them and married them, and said that he would square matters with his conscience--if he could. And he kept them in his attic for two days, which was their honeymoon--and then--a night of dogs and lanterns and shouting--he smuggled them off to the swamps again, and presided over their hiding until an opportunity came to get them aboard a tramp ship--and that was all there was to it, except that they had prospered and been happy ever since. I asked Mary about my father's part in it. But she gave him a clean bill. "He put two and two together," she said, "and he dropped a hint or two--and he paid me all my back wages in American money, and he made me a handsome present in English gold, but he never talked things over, never mentioned Will's name even." "It was the toe of my boot," said Will, "sticking out of the tree that made him guess where I was. You see, I'd climbed up in the hollow to hide, and to keep there without moving I had to stick my foot out through a knothole. I was up there all the day they tried to get the bloodhounds after me, with my boot sticking out. And they were beating around that tree for hours, but nobody looked up." "I've always wondered," said I, "why, they didn't send a man up inside the tree." "I've always thought," said Will, "that nobody liked to propose it for fear he'd be elected to do it himself. But maybe it didn't enter anybody's head. Anyhow, all's well that ends well."