Page:Hugh Pendexter--Tiberius Smith.djvu/31

 never find it except by accident. The burglar and the tax-collector, I say, are unknown, as it has shut itself off from the outside world for more than forty years. Moreover, it's stood at a standstill during that period. Why, it wouldn't know a post-office or a telephone if it met them in the street, while a lightning-rod agent would be received with childish enthusiasm. I'll wager it doesn't know to this day whether it's in Canada or the United States. And it was there that Tiberius and I discovered what we called the stay-at-home germ.

"To revert to the southern boundary of the State for three seconds. When we detrained I could see Tib was disappointed because the citizens didn't meet us at the station and weep on his last clean shirt and have the school-children there to wave flags and sing 'Welcome Home.'

"To be chemically correct, I couldn't see as he knew any one in the State. Finally he confessed that his parents had moved from Bellows Falls when he was three years old, yet he remained positive that if we went North and tarried in the older centres of civilization we'd find hosts of people who would quit their means of earning a livelihood to bask in the sunshine of his society. So we passed from one joint to another, discovering many Smiths, but not his Smiths, until nothing would do but we must drill over the hills, towards Canada, where the