Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/120

110 golden twilight in the west, and said to herself deliberately:— "It 's a very odd thing that I like that man's face so. I have never yet seen a face I like so much. He 's as strong as a lion, and as true. What 'll he ever do for a wife here in Deerway, I wonder."

The story of the next six weeks of John Bassett's life is as well told in one page as in hundreds; yet its vivid details of delight would need no spinning out, no exaggeration to fill the hundreds of pages; and as for color, it had the palette of the New England autumn, and the light of love, from which to paint its pictures.

It was an unusually beautiful autumn; the forests were like altar fronts in old cathedrals; they glittered with colors which gems could not outshine. Heavy September rains filled the brooks to over flowing, and left the air cooled for the October sunlight. Deerway lies on one of the highest plateaus in New England; this plateau is in places broken into myriads of conical and interlapping hills. These hills are thickly wooded with maple, ash, hickory, oak, chestnut, pine, cedar, hemlock, larch: not a tree of all New England's wealth of trees is lacking.

For miles and miles in all directions the roads run through forests and by the sides of brooks and streams. Then when you come out on the