base, leaving a protruding, umbrella-like thatch, not very substantial, but sufficient shelter for a still night.  Then and there we decided to play gypsy and camp out, literally under the sky.  Evan unharnessed the horse, watered him at a convenient roadside puddle, and tethered him at the rear of the stack, where he could nibble the hay, but not us!  Then spreading the horse-blanket on some loose hay for a bed, with the well-tufted seat of the buggy for a pillow, and utilizing the lap robe for a cover against dew, we fell heavily asleep, though I had all the time a half-conscious feeling as if little creatures were scrambling about in the hay beneath the blanket and occasionally brushing my face or ears with a batlike wing, tiny paws, or whisking tail.  When I awoke, and of course immediately stirred up Evan, the moon was low on the opposite side of the stack, the stars were hidden, and there was a dull red glow among the heavy clouds of the eastern horizon like the reflection of a distant fire, while an owl hooted close by from a tree and then flew with a lurch across the meadow, evidently to the destruction of some small creature, for a squeal accompanied the swoop.  A mysterious thing, this flight of the owl:  the wings did not flap, there was no sound, merely the consciousness of displaced air.

We were not, as it afterward proved, ten miles from home, and yet, as far as trace of humanity was concerned, we might have been the only created man and woman.

Do you remember the old gypsy song?—­Ben Jonson’s, I think—­

  “The owl is abroad, the bat, the toad,
   And so is the cat-a-mountain;
   The ant and the mole both sit in a hole,
   And frog peeps out o’ the fountain;
     The dogs they bay and the timbrels play
   And the spindle now is turning;
   The moon it is red, and the stars are fled
     But all the sky is a-burning.”

But we were still more remote, for of beaters of timbrels and turners of spindles were there none!

* * * * *

Your last chronicle interested us all.  In the first place father remembers Mrs. Marchant perfectly, for he and the doctor used to exchange visits constantly during that long-ago summer when they lived on the old Herb Farm at Coningsby.  Father had heard that she was hopelessly deranged, but nothing further, and the fact that she is living within driving distance in the midst of her garden of fragrance is a striking illustration both of the littleness of the earth and the social remoteness of its inhabitants.

Father says that Mrs. Marchant was always a very intellectual woman, and he remembers that in the old days she had almost a passion for fragrant flowers, and once wrote an essay upon the psychology of perfumes that attracted some attention in the medical journal in which it was published by her husband.  That the perfume of flowers should now have drawn the shattered fragments of her mind together for their comfort and given her the foretaste of immortality, by the sign of the consciousness of personal presence and peace, is beautiful indeed.