farm lay before him with its land rolling and sloping toward the South and West, to the level acres that skirted the river. The orchard, of which Blanket had spoken, lay in a sheltered hollow of the lower hills. which shut off the eastern and northern winds, and stored the sun and the warm southern breezes to be distilled again in nectar in the juices of great red and yellow apples.

Two vast barns dominated the farm. They stood with doors flung wide, and mows, empty of last year's wealth, cavernous for the sweet breathed crop of new hay which lay in cocks and winrows, or in broad freshcut swaths, over the mowing lands. In the distance, boys and men were loading the fully cured hay onto great ox-carts, and Barnaby fancied among them the gleam of a petticoat, and thereupon began again to wonder of many things.

These thoughts brought his straying eyes back to the buildings where they stood, barns and cribs, smokehouse and sheds, under the shelter of the hills, with the farmhouse itself well in front and imposing still, though dwarfed by the greater barns. It was four-square and staunch, two-storied in front, with a low sloping roof behind, which cut off the second story. Square and central, a chimney, suggestive of many flues, sent out no single spiral of smoke. A wood-shed, with winter doors now flung wide, stretched from the kitchen side and gave passage also to a low building where in winter the hot messes for poultry, pigs and cattle were prepared. Back of the house was a broad expanse of vegetable garden, in contrast with which a few scrimped and narrow flower beds were doleful and pathetic. In front of the woodshed were great piles of birch and hickory, awaiting the axe and saw, the space well covered with chips and cluttered with chopping-blocks. The fields were separated

by stone walls, loosely laid without cement, the openings protected by bars. An immense elm towered before the house on either side of the main doorway. The scene gave Barnaby the impress of active thrift, in which the almost silent house stood strangely incongruous. It was as if that which should have been the soul of the whole was sleeping or dead.

With a townsman's regard for metes and bounds, he questioned of means for reaching the highway without trespassing. The natural objection to this was complicated by the possibility of encountering the girl as the objecting person. He turned to the country behind him for a possible escape from a return by the lane, which presented itself to his mind as a retreat.

Beyond the height on which he stood, shut in to isolation by other hills, was a second farm, filling a cuplike hollow from which a rutted road led in the direction of the highway. There was a low, one-storied, unpainted house, with the ever present wood-shed ell; a barn whose dilapidation showed even at this distance; a crib, the seasonable emptiness of which was revealed by the swinging door, and straggling walls half buried in brambles and poison ivy. Against the house a show of red seemed at first a splash of paint, which on close looking revealed a climbing rose, rich with blossoms.

Almost directly beneath him, a man bent above his scythe, before which long swaths of ripe grass fell, as he moved down the little field. His bent form gave the impress of age, which the vigour of his strokes belied; and when finally he straightened at the end of the field, Barnaby saw the face and form of a young giant.

This man, moving up and down the field with the regularity of a shuttle driven by a weaver's hand, intensified to Barnaby the sense of solitude that the scene

itself conveyed. He had always seen men working in companies, but here was a man who seemed to have built himself into a cell of isolation, where he laboured as if labour was the end of being instead of a mere means thereto. The thought had fascination to him and he threw himself on the sun-warmed earth and watched the human shuttle swept back and forth by the master force of controlling purpose.

CHAPTER VII

THE TEMPEST

ARNABY awoke under a feeling of undefined but

terrible suffering. The noonday sun was pouring full upon him, and the air seemed to burn and sting as he breathed. His brain was like molten fire. He sat up and was conscious of a sense of nausea. Mechanically he glanced into the valley. Something was happening there that startled him out of the thrall of his own suffering.

The man had ceased mowing, and was raking together and loading on to an ox-wagon the hay that had been spread that morning for final curing. He was working with tremendous energy that was doubly dreadful under the relentless blaze of that terrible sun. As he worked, he glanced almost momently to the south, as if in watch on the source of his energy and fear.

Barnaby staggered to his feet and looked southward. From beyond the horizon great black and purple clouds were rolling up, slow and grand, but in their very slowness fulfilled with a sense of power, terrible and relentless. As they advanced, they blotted out the heavens and there remained only themselves.

Barnaby understood the terror that was driving the man to his superhuman efforts. It was a race between himself and the storm for the possession of the hay which, thoroughly cured, would be ruined by the coming rain. A keen sense came to him of the terrible odds against the man, with the tempest and God as his opponents,

and he darted down the sharp decline, tearing away his coat and waistcoat as he ran. He burst into the field with the demand:

"What can I do?"

"Rake it into loose cocks, like this!" the man accepted him. "I can load faster 'n you."

Swiftly Barnaby raked, and with equal swiftness the man pitched the cocks into the wagon. He handled his strength with the lightness of a slighter man and the ease of custom. Slowly the great clouds lifted themselves toward the zenith and the day grew dark. As the last cock was pitched on to the towering load, the man called, with a voice that sounded weird and faraway in the strange silence:

"See that the barn doors are open and the floor clear. We 've won, if I can get these beasts out of a

walk."

As he hurried toward the barn, the man called again: "Take your coat and vest. You'll have no time to save 'em later."

He cleared the space between the mows and stood in the great doorway watching, with a sense of helplessness, the final struggle between the man and the storm. The heavily laden wagon creaked and swung across the stretch of meadow, while beside it was the man shouting and prodding the oxen with the merciless goad. Behind, the clouds rolled nearer, their masses torn and whipped by the force of winds as yet unfelt on the earth's surface. Great billows of darkness swept down, as if reaching for the puny antagonist who had dared to pit his strength with the tempest, and then rolled back again, as if, sure of their prey, they were willing to tantalise him with the hope of escape. It seemed to Barnaby as if he must rush out and push and pull the wagon