people from other parts of the world? She herself had lived there
since the age of five, and had long supposed it to be a place of some
importance. But about a year before, Mr. Miles, the new Episcopal
clergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every other Sunday--when the roads
were not ploughed up by hauling--to hold a service in the North Dormer
church, had proposed, in a fit of missionary zeal, to take the young
people down to Nettleton to hear an illustrated lecture on the Holy
Land; and the dozen girls and boys who represented the future of North
Dormer had been piled into a farm-waggon, driven over the hills to
Hepburn, put into a way-train and carried to Nettleton.

In the course of that incredible day Charity Royall had, for the first
and only time, experienced railway-travel, looked into shops with
plate-glass fronts, tasted cocoanut pie, sat in a theatre, and listened
to a gentleman saying unintelligible things before pictures that she
would have enjoyed looking at if his explanations had not prevented her
from understanding them. This initiation had shown her that North Dormer
was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for information that
her position as custodian of the village library had previously failed
to excite. For a month or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedly
into the dusty volumes of the Hatchard Memorial Library; then the
impression of Nettleton began to fade, and she found it easier to take
North Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading.

The sight of the stranger once more revived memories of Nettleton, and
North Dormer shrank to its real size. As she looked up and down it, from
lawyer Royall's faded red house at one end to the white church at the
other, she pitilessly took its measure. There it lay, a weather-beaten
sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway,
trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern