“A civil engineer, I think,” he answered.  “You see, I’m a crank on fresh air and building things—­and he seems to be like me.  This cooped-up city life is pretty narrowing, don’t you think?”

“It’s fierce!” I returned heartily, with more warmth than elegance.  “Sometimes I wish I could chuck the whole business and go to farming.”

“Why not?” he asked as we climbed a small rise behind the house.  “Here’s my farm—­fifteen acres.  We raise most of our own truck.”

Below the hill a cornfield, now yellow with pumpkins, stretched to the farther road.  Nearer the house was a kitchen garden, with an apple orchard beyond.  A man in shirtsleeves was milking a cow behind a tiny barn.

“I bought this place three years ago for thirty-nine hundred dollars,” said my stenographer.  “They say it is worth nearer six thousand now.  Anyhow it is worth a hundred thousand to me!”

A little girl, with bulging apron, appeared at the edge of the orchard and came running toward us.

“What have you got there?” called her father.

“Oh, daddy!  Such lovely chestnuts!” cried the child.  “And there are millions more of them!”

“We’ll roast ’em after supper,” said her father.  “Toddle along now and wash up.”

She put up a rosy, beaming face to be kissed and dashed away toward the house.  I tried to remember what either of my two girls had been like at her age, but for some strange reason I could not.

Across the road the fertile countryside sloped away into a distant valley, hemmed in by dim blue hills, below which the sun had already sunk, leaving only a gilded edge behind.  The air was filled with a soft, smoky haze.  A church bell in the village struck six o’clock.

   “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
     The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
   The plowman homeward plods his weary way,”

I murmured.

“For ‘plowman’ read ‘golfer,’” smiled my host.  “By George, though—­it is pretty good to be alive!” The air had turned crisp and we both instinctively took a couple of deep breaths.  “Makes the city look like thirty cents!” he ejaculated.  “Of course it isn’t like New York or Southampton.”

“No, thank God!  It isn’t!” I muttered as we wandered toward the house.

“I hope you don’t mind an early supper,” apologized Mrs. Hastings as we entered; “but Jim gets absolutely ravenous.  You see, on weekdays his lunch is at best a movable feast.”

Our promptly served meal consisted of soup, scrambled eggs and bacon, broiled chops, fried potatoes, peas, salad, apple pie, cheese, grapes plucked fresh from the garden wall, and black coffee, distilled from a shining coffee machine.  Mrs. Hastings brought the things hot from the kitchen and dished them herself.  Tom and Sylvia, carefully spruced up, ate prodigiously and then helped clear away the dishes, while I produced my cigar case.