that does not need to mean anything. We could go slowly, having all the morning to get acquainted. Together the road and I looked down at the town through a screen of late September leaves.

The place lay in mist, partly of the late-lingering fog, partly of the fires that belong to these days when all the village rakes and burns, and the youngsters tumble and romp and shriek in piles of leaves. All outlines are blurred by a pearly haze, against which eddies the deeper blue of chimneysmoke. Beyond the town the hills are dull gray against the luminous gray of the sky, and between town and hill the river runs, a shining silver sheet, with broken, deep-toned reflections near the bank. Looking eastward through the flickering leaves, I watch the sun steadily shining through, shredding the mist with fires of opal, in gleams of blue and orange and amethyst. Down at the village they see none of this, they know only that the fog lifts while stubble-gardens, and lawns, and housefronts all turn brown and bare and commonplace beneath the relentless sun. It is for me to see the opal fires lick up the mist; such cheery little wonders of the road are all for me.

The road keeps silence, letting me listen to the village sounds, musically fused at this brief distance; the shunting of a freight train and its raucous whistle, the ringing of hammers on new scaffolding, the shrilling of the saw-mill, the barking of dogs. All to herself, like the shy one that she is, the little road murmurs her replies, in the twittering of sparrows in fence-thickets, in the rustle of wind in bared branches, in the scratch and scud of dry leaves that race, the soft thudding of a chestnut burr.

The sun is high, and the wind is blowing, and the comrade road is waiting, genially postponing its sure selfrevelation, but a-tiptoe to be off now

to the woods, where we may share our fun unmolested, unsuspected. The little road is climbing now beyond mistaking. She is stepping through the woods so familiarly that you might miss her trail if you did n't follow close, for she knows there is no fun in the woods if you can't get lost, can't drop the pack of personality from your shoulder, and grow one with brushwood shadow, or arched branch. When the road said this to me, I began to listen to her for every word that she might say. But stealing ever deeper into the woodland, my path is not talking now, she is singing rather, she is dancing. Suddenly in the deeps of the wood she opens up a long green alley of fairy turf, and waits to see if I will share it with her and go scudding it like a squirrel. The white state-way never dreamed that I could fly, but the little friend-road knew. The road plays with me. Near the rut made by a lumber team, she tosses a handful of wintergreen berries like flecks of coral for me to garner, and lifts a sudden torch of scarlet oak against some woodrecess black and deep as a cave. Every time she hears the sound of wood-chopping she whisks away into still deeper shadow to be alone with me. Looking to right and left you cannot see the open; the only open is above, in the blue.

In the heart of the woods there is elfland. Trusting me, the little road dared to turn mad, she who had been so circumspect down below in the valley. Of the trees, some were still summer green and some were russet gold and some were claret crimson, so that the sifted light was strange, the light of faery. There is no state road anywhere,' said my mad little path to me, 'there is nothing in all the world but wood and sky. You are a tree, a cloud, a leaf, there is no you! Dance!' In and out through the trees she eddied and whirled, my road, glad as a scud

ding cloud and mad as the wind, in and out, in and out. Free winds that piped in the tree-tops, white clouds that raced the blue above us, laced branches that swayed to a dance eternal, exhaustless, -round and round we eddied, panting, the road and I, all by ourselves, alone, unguessed, in the heart of the woods. They, too, were drunk with the madness of out-of-doors, Bacchus's mænads.

Then, 'Whisk!' cried the little road, 'we can't long keep up this sort of thing, friend-woman!' She turned

sober in an instant, wild laughter dying to bubbling chuckles at itself. The tall trees broke away abruptly on stumppocked fields, flaunting sumach by their stone walls. We had come upon a bustling little farm. My road, the wild and lonely-hearted, was transformed into a chatty neighbor, and turned in cheerily to pass the time of day at the back door. A brisk and friendly farm it was. The orchard jounced us a red apple as we passed, a white-nosed horse thrust head from the barn window and whinnied a welcome. Two shepherd dogs, one a stiffened grandsire, the other a rollicking puppy, barked a dutiful protest, then sniffed and licked genially. There was a baby carriage on the porch, a swing beneath the shaggy dooryard pine, there were geraniums at the window, and gleaming milk-pans on the back porch. Beyond the big house was a whole village of miniature houses, kennels and chicken sheds and corn-cribs, set down cosily anywhere to be handy. The big red barns were chatty with clucking hens. A sunny, sociable, commonplace farm that drew us to gossip on the back steps, to pause and rest there, the road and I. As we chatted, lingering and happy, of buttermilk and buckwheat and the cut of kitchen aprons, would any one have guessed that this little cosy domestic road, back there beyond the turn, had

reeled in bacchic dance for very ecstasy of solitude?

When we were alone again, the road explained, questioning with searching friend-eyes to see if I understood, 'Many selves belong to every road that must be always climbing a hill, all alone. Don't you know,' laughed the little road, 'that there was never a dryad but longed sometimes to bind a big apron over her flickering leaffilms and slip into some crofter's cot in Tempe and slap the wheat-cakes on the warm hearth-stones?

'And I have other moods as I climb,' whispered the little road, as we took hands and trudged along, shuffling the leaves and playing with them, with no one to watch, sharing with each other the eternal child that chuckles inside lonely folk; the undying child within us is not startled to hear itself laugh out loud in the friendly solitude of little roads like this.

Yet, laughing, we were thoughtful, too. Maples like great torches of flame studded the wayside, and beyond them in broad fields marched the corn-shocks, a ragged brown battalion. The sky was ever burning bluer above the hill-crest. Then we left the farm fields for a wild stretch of boulder-grown pasture, and suddenly the little road said, ‘Look, a wayside shrine! Let us stop.'

Pine trees such as survive now in only a few scattered groves formed a vaulted chapel. Beneath the trees someone had built a rude stone pile, a picnic fireplace, now for us become an altar, for to a little wildwood road all things are natural. We stood silent on that pavement of brown pine-needles beneath the arching green, supported on its blue-brown pillars of high pine trunks. Through the far tops there went singing an eternal chant. No one ever listened long to that music, all alone, who did not know that it is a hymn older than any creed, and out

living all doubt. In the amber-lit shrine, swept by clean wind and haunted by eternal music, there was beauty to empty the heart of all desire, so that, troubled, I asked, 'But it was to pray that we stopped?'

'Oh,' answered the pagan road, 'I never pray, for what is the use of learning how to lisp?- I only praise!'

We were a long time silent beneath the pines, but we were deeper friends when we went on, for there is no bond in friendship closer than the sharing of a faith. Our feet were springing along

as up we went. There were no more farms now, only at last above us the hill-top and the sky, clouds that raced across it, the sweep of great clean winds, and the call of high-winging

crows.

The little road, so shy at starting, now dared to say to me this intimacy, 'Do you not know my gospel, - that gladness is God? That is why I am always climbing hills. That is why I called you this morning, so that for a little while I and you might step into the sky.'

BARBER SHOPS OF YESTERDAY

I HAVE just been to a barber shop, -not a city barber-shop, where you expect tiled floors and polished mirrors and a haughty Venus by a table in the corner, who glances scornfully at your hands as you give your hat, coat, and collar to a boy, as much as to say, 'Manicures himself!'- but a country barber shop, in a New England small town. I rather expected that the experience would repay me, in awakened pleasant memories, for a very poor hair-cut. Instead, I got a very good hair-cut, and no pleasant memories were awakened at all; not, that is, by the direct process of suggestion. I was only led to muse on barber shops of my boyhood because this one was so different. Even the barber was different. He chewed gum, he worked quickly, he used shaving powder and took his cloths from a sterilizer, and finally he held a hand-glass behind my head for me to see the result, quite like his city

cousins. (By the way, was ever man so brave as to say the cut was n't all right, when the barber held that handglass behind his head? And what would the barber say if he did?) No, this shop was antiseptic, and uninteresting. There was not even a picture on the walls!

But, to the barber's soothing snip, snip, snip, and the gentle tug of the comb, I dreamed of the barber shops of my boyhood, and of Clarkie Parker's in particular. Clarkie's shop was in Lyceum Hall block, one flight up—a huge room, with a single green upholstered barber's chair between the windows, where you could sit and watch the town go by below you. The room smelled pungently of bay rum. Barber shops don't smell of bay rum any more. Around two sides were ranged many chairs and an old leather couch. The chair-arms were smooth and black with the rubbing of innumerable hands and elbows, and behind them, making a dark line along the wall, were the

marks where the heads of the sitters rubbed as they tilted back. Nor can I forget the spittoons,—large, shallow boxes, two feet square,— four of them, full of sand. On a third side of the room stood the basin and water-taps, and beside them a large black-walnut cabinet, full of shelves. The shelves were full of mugs, and on every mug was a name, in gilt letters, generally Old English. Those mugs were a town directory of our leading citizens. My father's mug was on the next to the top shelf, third from the end on the right. The sight of it used to thrill me, and at twelve I began surreptitiously to feel my chin, to see if there were any hope of my achieving a mug in the not too distant future.

Above the chairs, the basin, the cabinet, hung pictures. Several of those pictures I have never seen since, but the other day in New York I came upon one of them in a print-shop on Fourth Avenue, and was restrained from buying it only by the, to me, prohibitive price. I've been ashamed ever since, too, that I allowed it to be prohibitive. I feel traitorous to a memory. It was a lurid lithograph of a burning building upon which brave firemen in red shirts were pouring copious streams of water, while other brave firemen worked the pump-handles of the engine. The flames were leaping out in orange tongues from every window of the doomed structure (which was a fine business block three stories high), but you felt sure that the heroes would save all adjoining property, in spite of the evident high wind. Another picture in Clarkie's shop showed these same firemen (at least, they, too, wore red shirts) hauling their engine out of its abode; and still another displayed them hauling it back again. On this latter occasion it was coated with ice, and I used to wonder if all these pictures depicted the same fire, because the trees were in full

leaf in the others. There also hung on the walls a truly superb engraving of the loss of the Arctic. Her bow (or was it her stern?) was high in air, and figures were dropping off it into the sea, like nuts from a shaken hickory. This was a very terrible picture, and one turned with relief to Maud S. standing before a bright green hedge and looking every inch a gentle champion, or the stuffed pickerel, twenty-four inches long, framed under glass, with his weight-a ponderous figure-printed on the frame.

Clarkie Parker was in reality a barber by avocation. The art he loved was angling. Patience with a rod and line, the slow contemplation of rivers, was in his blood, and in his fingers. It took him a long time to cut your hair, even when, on the first hot day of June, you bade him, "Take it all off with the lawn mower.' (Do any boys have their heads clean clipped in summer any more?) But while he cut, he talked of fishing. You listened as to one having authority. He knew every brook, every pool, every pond, for miles around. You went next day where Clarkie advised. And there was no use expecting a hair-cut or a shave on the first of April, when "the law went off on trout." Clarkie's shop was shut. If the day happened to be Saturday, many a pious man in our village had to go to church upon the morrow unshaven or untrimmed.

I know not what has become now of Clarkie or his shop. Doubtless they have gone the way of so many pleasantly flavored things of our vanished New England. I only know that I still possess a razor he sold me when my downy face had begun to arouse public derision. I shall always cherish that razor, though I never shave with it. I never could shave with it! But I love Clarkie just the same. He only proved himself thereby the ultimate Yankee.

Past my door the busy nurses flit; they do hard things to me with deft and tender hands. Motor-cars roar to the unseen entrance and the doctors come stamping and booming through the hall in all their professional cheerfulness, not professional only, big, cheer-giving boys that they are. Sometimes my door is swiftly closed, that I may not hear or see, but I know the sound of those creaking wheels and the burden that they carry; burden wide-eyed and fearful as it goes, sodden with heaviest sodden with heaviest sleep when it comes back.

But my room has a window. Sounds float through it to me in bed, distant engines that shunt and call; nearer hens that clack incessantly like busy housekeepers who never cease; the shrillsweet fluting of a cardinal bird, highesthearted whistling in the world, like a gallant fife at the lips of a prince; the far-away lusty crying of the baby boy who is the latest comer: I wonder what she lies and thinks about, that newborn mother; I wonder what he is thinking about, that new man-soul who came flying through another hospital window like my own.

There are flowers against my panes, -tall hibiscus, with pointed leaves and great pink bloom against the sky; only flowers and sky in my window, delicate selection: sky high-blue, cloud-swept, or palest pink, and flowers great pink blossoms, crimson-hearted and goldpistiled. All day the hibiscus holds open house. At six, when the white mist is

first upcurling from the world and the sky is clouded opal, comes dart and whirring of my humming-bird. I can see his tiny feet just poised upon the broad pink petal, his hungry beak hidden. For such a fairy thing, what little glutton cries he can give! A hundred times a day he comes. He is my last caller of an evening, after the night nurse has safely nested me. What a sorry little drunkard he must be, yet undizzied in his cups!

There are other guests, arriving, sipping, off again, all day. The bumblebees rumble and fumble until the pink blossoms shake and dip beneath their onslaughts. The bumble-bees take their time, clumsy and careless; the other bees are more business-like, -a brief drink for them and then off again to work. Airiest gallants of the tavern are the butterflies, all in their jeweled velvet. They come a-dart out of nowhere to hang a moment motionless, outlined sharp as green leaf and pink petal against the sky. Bird and bee and butterfly, how they drink and drink! I never knew hibiscus held such bacchanalian invitation for all the tipplers of the air.

By night my merry flowers turn elfin. They sway in strange slow dance. Even on a moonless night they gleam moon-white, and the leaves have a silver underside. And then, mysterious, while you look, out bud the stars. They gleam from between petals, from beneath leaves. They gem the blue above and throb against the panes, as I watch, for hospital nights are long, stretching darkness and stillness, broken by the buzz of some wakeful call-bell, and the hurrying patter of the night nurse, answering the summons.

At night, out of the shadow in the corner of the room, comes pain, stalking to grapple across my bed with comfortable sleep, to grapple and to conquer, while I hide and cry and beg.