IT was the end of another day when Caleb Trench and his dog, Shot, came slowly down the long white road from Paradise Ridge. It is a shell road, exceeding white and hard, and below it, at flood-tide, the river meadows lie half submerged; it turns the corner below the old mill and passes directly through the center of Eshcol to the city. Behind the mill, the feathery green of spring clouded the low hills in a mist of buds and leafage. The slender stem of a silver birch showed keen against a group of red cedars. A giant pine thrust its height above its fellows, its top stripped by lightning and hung with a squirrel’s nest.

Trench and his dog, a rough yellow outcast that he had adopted, were approaching the outskirts of Eshcol. Here and there was a farmhouse, but the wayside was lonely, and he heard only the crows in the tree-tops. It was past five o’clock and the air was sweet. He smelt the freshly turned earth in the fields where the robins were hunting for grubs. Beyond the river the woods were drifted white with wild cucumber. Yonder, in the corner of a gray old fence, huddled some of Aaron Todd’s sheep. The keen atmosphere was mellowing at the far horizon to molten gold; across it a drifting flight of swallows was sharply etched, an eddying maelstrom of graceful wings.

In the middle of the road Caleb Trench was suddenly aware of a small figure, which might have been three years old, chubby and apparently sexless, for it was clad in a girl’s petticoats and a boy’s jacket, its face round and smeared with jelly.

“Sammy,” said Trench kindly, “how did you get here?”

“Penny,” said Sammy, “wants penny!”

To Sammy the tall man with the homely face and clear gray eyes was a mine of pennies and consequently of illicit candy; the soul of Sammy was greedy as well as his stomach. Trench thrust his hand into his pocket and produced five pennies. Sammy’s dirty little fist closed on them with the grip of the nascent financier.

“Sammy tired,” he sobbed, “wants go to candy man’s!”

Trench stooped good-naturedly and lifted the bundle of indescribable garments; he had carried it before, and the candy man was only a quarter of a mile away. He was raising the child to his shoulder when the growth of pokeberry bushes at the roadside shook and a woman darted out from behind it. She was scarcely more than a girl and pitifully thin and wan. Her garments, too, were sexless; she wore a girl’s short skirt and a man’s waistcoat; a man’s soft felt hat rested on a tan