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 laving him for a moment in the cool of her clear brown eyes.

"You are a host on my side, Miss McCoy."

"Yes, and you're a stoppin' my door up so the air can't blow in on me," Uncle Boley complained, with a great comical exaggeration of injury and pretense of suffocation. "Git out of here and do your talkin' and passin' compliments, you two young sky-looters!"

He shooed them out like chickens, chuckling in his beard, and watched them as they went off together in the slant sunlight of the autumn day.

Sallie was on her way to gather goldenrod, she said, to adorn her room at school. It grew abundantly by the roadside everywhere, but it was better just out of town, away from the dust of wheels and hoofs. Yes, he might go if he wished; he would be useful to help carry it, for she meant to gather a great deal, oh, an immense amount of it, indeed.

The world was full of gold that day, of black-eyed Susans wearing bonnets of it, of sunflowers blooming late, destined to fall before the frost, and goldenrod in banks and wide stretches over the wild meadowlands. For it is the way of nature on the Kansas plains to send springtime white-garlanded, like a bride, and autumn splendid in a golden cope, like a luxurious bishop come to give benediction on the summer labors of men.