The Panjandrum carriage had scarcely bowled away, when a little buggy and a sorrel pony came up the road, and somebody alighted with a brisk spring, slipped the rein with a loose knot through the fence-rail at the corner, and came up one side of the two-plank foot-walk that ran around the Horseshoe; somebody who had come home unexpectedly, to take his little wife to ride.  Kenneth Kincaid had business over at the new district of “Clarendon Park.”

Drives, and livery-stable bills, were no part of the items allowed for, in the programme of these young people’s living; therefore Rosamond put on her gray hat, with its soft little dove’s breast, and took her bright-striped shawl upon her arm, and let Kenneth lift her into the buggy—­for which there was no manner of need except that they both liked it,—­with very much the feeling as if she were going off on a lovely bridal trip.  They had had no bridal trip, you see; they did not really want one; and this little impromptu drive was such a treat!

Now the wonders of nature and the human mind show—­if I must go so far to find an argument for the statement I am making—­that into a single point of time or particle of matter may be gathered the relations of a solar system or the experiences of a life; that a universe may be compressed into an atom, or a molecule expanded into a macrocosm; therefore I expect nobody to sneer at my Rosamond as childishly nappy in her simple honeymoon, or at me for making extravagant and unsupported assertions, when I say that this hour and a half, and these four miles out to Clarendon Park and back,—­the lifting and the tucking in, and the setting off, the sitting side by side in the ripe October air and the golden twilight, the noting together every pretty turn, every flash of autumn color in the woods, every change in the cloud-groupings overhead, every glimpse of busy, bright-eyed squirrels up and down the walls, every cozy, homely group of barnyard creatures at the farmsteads, the change, the pleasure, the thought of home and always-togetherness,—­all this made the little treat of a country ride as much to them, holding all that any wandering up and down the whole world in their new companionship could hold,—­as a going to Europe, or a journey to mountains and falls and sea-sides and cities, in a skimming of the States.  You cannot have more than there is; and you do not care, for more than just what stands for and emphasizes the essential beauty, the living gladness, that no place gives, but that hearts carry about into places and baptize them with, so that ever afterward a tender charm hangs round them, because “we saw it then.”

And Kenneth and Rosamond Kincaid had all these bright associations, these beautiful glamours, these glad reminders, laid up for years to come, in a four miles space that they might ride or walk over, re-living it all, in the returning Octobers of many other years.  I say they had a bridal tour that day, and that the four miles were as good as four thousand.  Such little bits of signs may stand for such high, great, blessed things!