AN AFRICAN DISCOVERY

AN EVENING WITH CALLENDER




A VILLAGE OPHELIA


On the East end of Long Island, from Riverhead to Greenport, a distance
of about thirty miles, two country roads run parallel.

The North road is very near the Sound and away from the villages; lonely
farm-houses are scattered at long intervals; in some places their number
increases enough to form a little desolate settlement, but there is
never a shop, nor sign of village life. That, one must seek on the South
road, with its small hamlets, to which the "North roaders," as they are
somewhat condescendingly called, drive across to church, or to make
purchases.

It was on the North road that I spent a golden August in the home of
Mrs. Libby. Her small gray house was lovingly empaled about the front
and sides by snow-ball bushes and magenta French-lilacs, that grew
tenderly close to the weather-worn shingles, and back of one sunburnt
field, as far as the eye could see, stretched the expanse of dark,
shining scrub-oaks, beyond which, one knew, was the hot, blue glitter of
the Sound.

Mrs. Libby was a large iron-gray widow of sixty, insatiably greedy of