But my heart smites me with ingratitude toward some kindly memories as I write that—­memories of homely welcome, simple and touching and dignified.  Surely I am not writing so of the genial farmer on whom we came one lunch hour as he was stripping corn in his yard.

“Missus,” he called to the house a few yards away, “can you find any lunch for two good-looking fellows here?”

The housewife came to the door, scanned us for a second, and replied in the affirmative.  As we sat down to table, our host bowed his head and said a simple grace for the bacon and cabbage, pumpkin-pie, cheese and tea we were about to receive; and the unexpected old-fashioned rite, too seldom encountered nowadays, came on me with a fresh beauty and impressiveness, which made me feel that its discontinuance is a real loss of gracious ritual in our lives, and perhaps even more.  Thus this simple farmer’s board seemed sensitively linked with the far-away beginnings of time.  Of all our religious symbolism, the country gods and the gods of the hearth and the household seem actual, approachable presences, and the saying of grace before meat was a beautiful, fitting reminder of that mysterious, invisible care and sustenance of our lives, which no longer find any recognition in our daily routine:  Above all, worship thou the gods, and bring great Ceres her yearly offerings.

Another such wayside meal and another old couple live touchingly in our memories.  We were still in the broad, sun-swept valley of the Genesee, our road lying along the edge of the wide, reed-grown flats and water-meadows, bounded on the north by rolling hills.  On our left hand, parallel with the road, ran a sort of willowed moat banked by a grass-grown causeway, a continuous narrow mound, somewhat higher than the surrounding country, and cut through here and there with grass-grown gullies, the whole suggesting primeval earthworks and excavations.  So the old Roman roads run, grassy and haunted and choked with underbrush, in the lonelier country districts of England.  We were curious as to the meaning of this causeway, and learned at length that here was all that remained of the old Genesee Canal.  Thirty years ago, this moat had brimmed with water, and barges had plied their sleepy traffic between Dansville and Rochester.  But the old order had changed, and a day had come when the dike had been cut through, the lazy water let out into the surrounding flats, and the old waterway left to the willows and the wild-flowers, the mink and the musk-rat.  Only thirty years ago—­yet to-day Nature has so completely taken it all back to herself that the hush of a long-vanished antiquity is upon it, and the turfy burial mound of some Hengist and Horsa could not be more silent.