she said.  “It must be some stranger, and Jane will do.  No, a little boy is driving.  Strangers coming along this road would not be driven by little boys.  I expect I shall have to call Uncle John.”  Then she put down the glass and rubbed her eye, after which, with unassisted vision, she gazed along the road.  “I can see a great deal better without that old thing,” she continued.  “There’s a woman in that carriage.  I’ll go myself.”  With this she jumped down from the rustic seat, and with the telescope under her arm, she skipped through the garden to the little tollhouse.

The name of this girl was Olive Asher.  Captain John Asher, who took the toll, was her uncle, and she had now been living with him for about six weeks.  Olive was what is known in certain social circles as a navy girl.  About twenty years before she had come to her uncle’s she had been born in Genoa, her father at the time being a lieutenant on an American war-vessel lying in the harbor of Villa Franca.  Her first schooldays were passed in the south of France, and she spent some subsequent years in a German school in Dresden.  Here she was supposed to have finished her education but when her father’s ship was stationed on our Pacific coast and Olive and her mother went to San Francisco they associated a great deal with army people, and here the girl learned so much more of real life and her own country people that the few years she spent in the far West seemed like a post-graduate course, as important to her true education as any of the years she had spent in schools.

After the death of her mother, when Olive was about eighteen, the girl had lived with relatives, East and West, hoping for the day when her father’s three years’ cruise would terminate, and she could go and make a home for him in some pleasant spot on shore.  Now, in the course of these family visits she had come to stay with her father’s brother, John Asher, who kept the toll-gate on the Glenford pike.

Captain John Asher was an older man than his brother, the naval officer, but he was in the prime of life, and able to hold the command of a ship if he had cared to do it.  But having been in the merchant service for a long time, and having made some money, he had determined to leave the sea and to settle on shore; and, finding this commodious house by the toll-gate, he settled there.  There were some people who said that he had taken the position of toll-gate keeper because of the house, and there were others who believed that he had bought the house on account of the toll-gate.  But no matter what people thought or said, the good captain was very well satisfied with his home and his official position.  He liked to meet with people, and he preferred that they should come to him rather than that he should go to them.  He was interested in most things that were going on in his neighborhood, and therefore he liked to talk to the people who were going by.  Sometimes a good talking acquaintance or an interesting traveler would tie his horse under the shade of the maple-tree and sit a while with the captain on the little porch.  Certain it was, it was the most hospitable toll-gate in that part of the country.