But the farm was reached by more open methods.  Dolly and the phaeton were the chief instruments.  First—­if you were so sunk in ignorance as not to know the road—­you inquired of everybody for the chewing gum factory, to be known by its smell of peppermint.  Then you sought the high bridge over the railroad tracks.  Beyond was Kamm’s Corners.  Here, at a turn of the road, was a general store whose shelves sampled the produce of this whole fair world and the factories thereof.  One might have thought that the proprietor emulated Noah at the flood by bidding two of each created things to find a place inside.

Beyond Kamm’s Corners you came to the great valley.  When almost down the hill you passed a house with broken windows and unkept grass.  This house, by report, was haunted, but you could laugh at such tales while the morning sun was up.  At the bottom of the hill a bridge crossed the river, with loose planking that rattled as though the man who made nails was dead.

Beyond the bridge, at the first rise of ground, the horse stopped—­for I assume that you drove a sagacious animal—­by way of hint that every one of sound limb get out and walk to the top of the hill.  A suspicious horse turned his head now and again and cast his eye upon the buggy to be sure that no one climbed in again.

Presently you came to the toll-gate at the top and paid its keeper five cents, or whatever large sum he demanded.  Then your grandfather—­if by fortunate chance you happened to have one—­asked after his wife and children, and had they missed the croup; then told him his corn was looking well.

My grandfather—­for it is time you knew him—­lived with us.  Because of a railway accident fifteen years before in which one of his legs was cut off just below the knee, he had retired from public office.  Several years of broken health had been followed by years that were for the most part free from suffering.  My own first recollection reverts to these better years.  I recall a tall man—­to my eyes a giant, for he was taller even than my father—­who came into the nursery as I was being undressed.  There was a wind in the chimney, and the windows rattled.  He put his crutches against the wall.  Then taking me in his arms, he swung me aloft to his shoulder by a series of somersaults.  I cried this first time, but later I came to demand the performance.

Once, when I was a little older, I came upon one of his discarded wooden legs as I was playing in the garret of the house.  It was my first acquaintance with such a contrivance.  It lay behind a pile of trunks and I was, at the time, on my way to the center of the earth, for the cheerful path dove into darkness behind the chimney.  You may imagine my surprise.  I approached it cautiously.  I viewed it from all sides by such dusty light as fell between the trunks.  Not without fear I touched it.  It was unmistakably a leg—­but whose?  Was it possible that there was a kind of