The region through which I walked was typical of the open country of the Middle States. Over its rolling surface was the varied arrangement of wood and field and pasture-land, with the farmers' houses and barns attesting separate possession. There were frequent brooks and narrow winding country roads; roads lined with zigzag rail fences and loose stone walls, along which dwarfed birches grew, and elderberry bushes, and sumach, with wild grape-vines and clematis creeping on the walls; while in the coarse turf on the banks, there blossomed immortelles, and purple aster, and golden-rod. Mr. Hill had given me clear directions. At the post-office of Irish Lane I turned sharply toward Marshall's Hollow, and passed on the way a camp-meeting ground, where deep in the shadows of a grove stood numbers of rough wooden huts; grouped in chance community, and little suggesting in the weird stillness of desertion, the sounds of revival worship, with which they are made to ring through a part of every summer. At Harveyville I turned abruptly up the hillside in the direction of Cambra. It was high noon when I reached that village, and I was but a few miles beyond it, on the way to Benton, when I stopped to get something to eat. It was the evident poverty of the house where I stopped that interested me. I knew that there was no hope of earning a meal at such a place, but I could pay for what I ate, and I was sure of being less of an annoyance there than at some well-to-do farmer's house. The cottage was an unpainted wooden shell, and, like it, the corn-crib and pig-pen and little barn beyond seemed tottering to a fall. Faded leaves of a woodbine, that climbed upon the cottage, were thick about the door-way, and lay strewn by the wind upon the bare floor within. There was but one room on the ground floor, and a stove and a sewing-machine and a small wooden chest were all its furniture. I knocked at the open door. Through an opposite one, communicating with a lean-to, a woman appeared. She was large and muscular, but in her face was the sickly pallor of ill-nourishment, and her hair was dishevelled, and the loose, ragged dress which she wore was covered with dark, greasy stains. I asked for bread and milk; she explained that the family had just finished dinner, but that she could give me something, if I would wait, and she invited me to a seat on the chest. I drew from my pack an unfinished newspaper, and as I read I could feel innumerable eyes upon me. Through the cracks in the door, and the ragged breaks in the plaster, came the inquisitive gaze of children's eyes, and I could hear their eager whispers as a swarm of children crowded one another for possession of the best peep-holes.