spend the day with me. They are dam-bore, these religious
ceremonies, Finlinson, eh?"

Peroo, well known to the crew, had possessed himself of the
inlaid wheel, and was taking the launch craftily up-stream. But
while he steered he was, in his mind, handling two feet of
partially untwisted wire-rope; and the back upon which he beat
was the back of his guru.

End of THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS



A WALKING DELEGATE

ACCORDING to the custom of Vermont, Sunday afternoon is
salting-time on the farm, and, unless something very important
happens, we attend to the salting ourselves. Dave and Pete, the
red oxen, are treated first; they stay in the home meadow ready
for work on Monday. Then come the cows, with Pan, the calf, who
should have been turned into veal long ago, but survived on
account of his manners; and lastly the horses, scattered through
the seventy acres of the Back Pasture.

You must go down by the brook that feeds the clicking, bubbling
water-ram; up through the sugar-bush, where the young maple
undergrowth closes round you like a shallow sea; next follow the
faint line of an old county-road running past two green hollows
fringed with wild rose that mark the cellars of two ruined
houses; then by Lost Orchard, where nobody ever comes except in