Page:Hugh Pendexter--Tiberius Smith.djvu/30

 phantoms of those times and scenes to troop by, to remember that that very village is now revelling in and pondering over a wealth of newly acquired information, all due to the careless coming of my master.

"Perhaps in all our little journeys my benefactor never met with a more grotesque and fanciful environment than awaited us there. Possibly the opera-bouffe effects had remained dormant largely because the community, known as Home Valley, was off the line of any travel and was a neighbor only to a few struggling French hamlets, where the poorer and more illiterate Canadians grub a living from the rocky clearings. But one fact was soon to be evidenced: those inland Crusoes had never possessed the incentive to pry into the world beyond the rim of the rugged Dozen Hills.

"Now any other man in visiting the stagnated hollow would have left it as he found it. You would have done so, and so would have I. But nature, I reckon, in mapping out the rotund form and indomitable spirit of my patron, evidently intended him for a missionary, and his slipping into the life of a showman was merely an abortion.

"But the remembrance of it all makes me smile tolerantly as I loll back and listen to the wise guys dwell upon the quiet spots they have found asleep. For this place is not down on the map and you'd