"I mean you talk so differently from the others in the valley. Either
they talk of crops or weather, or they sit in silence and just look
wise. I suppose you have travelled?"

"As compared to most folks in Black Log I am a regular Gulliver," I
answered. "My father was a much-travelled man. He was an Englishman
and came to the valley by chance and settled here, and to his dying day
he was a puzzle to the people. That an Englishman should come to Six
Stars was a phenomenon. That Isaac Bolum and Henry Holmes should be
born here was no mere chance--it was a law of nature."

"And this English father?"

"He married, and then Tim and I came to Black Log."

"Like Isaac Bolum and Henry Holmes?"

"Exactly; and we should have grown like them, but our father was a
bookish man, and with him we travelled; we went with Dickens and
Thackeray and those fellows, and as we came to different places in the
books, he told us all about them. He'd seen them all, so we got to
know his country pretty well. Once he took us to Harrisburg, and by
multiplying everything we saw there, Tim and I were able to picture all
the great cities of the world--for instance, London is five hundred
times Harrisburg."

"But why didn't you go to see the places yourself?"

"Why doesn't everybody in Black Log go to Florida in winter or take the