She left me for a moment and soon the whole household was gathered about me on the porch, the men having come up from the fields.  The Senator had told them on his last visit of my proficiency as a sound-hand writer and I amused them by explaining the art of it.  They put my horse in the barn and pressed me to stay for dinner, which I did.  It was a plain boiled dinner at which the Senator’s cousin and his hired man sat down in their shirt-sleeves and during which I heard many stories of the boyhood of the great man.  As I was going the gentle old lady gave me a pair of mittens which her distinguished son had worn during his last winter in college.  I remember well how tenderly she handled them!

“I hope that Silas will get you to help him”—­those were the last words she said to me when I bade her good-by.

The visit had set me up a good deal.  The knowledge that I had been so much in the Senator’s thoughts, and that he approved my decision to leave the learned judge, gave me new heart.  I had never cherished the thought that he would take me to Washington although, now and then, a faint star of hope had shone above the capitol in my dreams.  As I rode along I imagined myself in that great arena and sitting where I could see the flash of its swords and hear the thunder of Homeric voices.  That is the way I thought of it.  Well, those were no weak, piping times of peace, my brothers.  They were times of battle and as I rode through that peaceful summer afternoon I mapped my way to the fighting line.  I knew that I should enjoy the practise of the law but I had begun to feel that eventually my client would be the people whose rights were subject to constant aggression as open as that of the patroons or as insidious as that of the canal ring.

The shadows were long when I got to Canterbury.  At the head of its main street I looked down upon a village green and some fine old elms.  It was a singularly quiet place.  I stopped in front of a big white meeting house.  An old man was mowing in its graveyard near the highway.  Slowly he swung his scythe.

“It’s a fine day,” I said.

“No, it ain’t, nuther-too much hard work in it,” said he.

“Do you know where Kate Fullerton lives?” I asked.

“Well, it’s purty likely that I do,” he answered as he stood resting on his snath.  “I’ve lived seventy-two years on this hill come the fourteenth day o’ June, an’ if I didn’t know where she lived I’d be ’shamed of it.”

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment and added: 

“I know everybody that lives here an’ everybody that dies here, an’ some that orto be livin’ but ain’t an’ some that orto be dead which ye couldn’t kill `em with an ax—­don’t seem so—­I declare it don’t.  Do ye see that big house down there in the trees?”

I could see the place at which he pointed far back from the village street in the valley below us, the house nearly hidden by tall evergreens.