In the effort to shake off the depression this loneliness had brought on his spirits, he turned to an ancient countryman, wearing overalls of blue jeans, who dozed comfortably on the circular bench beneath the mulberry tree.

“Is there a nearer way to Jordan’s Journey, or must I follow the turnpike?” he asked.

“Hey?  Young Adam, are you thar, suh?”

Young Adam, a dejected looking youth of fifty years, with a pair of short-sighted eyes that glanced over his shoulder as if in fear of pursuit, shuffled round the trough of the well, and sat down on the bench at his parent’s side.

“He wants to know, pa, if thar’s a short cut from the ornary over to Jordan’s Journey,” he repeated.

Old Adam, who had sucked patiently at the stem of his pipe during the explanation, withdrew it at the end, and thrust out his lower lip as a child does that has stopped crying before it intended to.

“You can take a turn to the right at the blazed pine a half a mile on,” he replied, “but thar’s the bars to be pulled down an’ put up agin.”

“I jest come along thar, an’ the bars was down,” said young Adam.

“Well, they hadn’t ought to have been,” retorted old Adam, indignantly.  “Bars is bars whether they be public or private, an’ the man that pulls ‘em down without puttin’ ’em up agin, is a man that you’ll find to be loose moraled in other matters.”

“It’s the truth as sure as you speak it, Mr. Doolittle,” said a wiry, knocked-kneed farmer, with a hatchet-shaped face, who had sidled up to the group.  “It warn’t no longer than yesterday that I was sayin’ the same words to the new minister, or rector as he tries to get us to call him, about false doctrine an’ evil practice.  ’The difference between sprinklin’ and immersion ain’t jest the difference between a few drips on the head an’ goin’ all under, Mr. Mullen,’ I said, ’but ’tis the whole difference between the natur that’s bent moral an’ the natur that ain’t.’  It follows as clear an’ logical as night follows day—­now, I ax you, don’t it, Mr. Doolittle—­that a man that’s gone wrong on immersion can’t be trusted to keep his hands off the women?”

“I ain’t sayin’ all that, Solomon Hatch,” responded old Adam, in a charitable tone, “seein’ that I’ve never made up my own mind quite clear on those two p’ints—­but I do say, be he immersed or sprinkled, that the man who took down them bars without puttin’ ’em up ain’t a man to be trusted.”

“’Twarn’t a man, ’twas a gal,” put in young Adam, “I seed Molly Merryweather goin’ toward the low grounds as I come up.”

“Then it’s most likely to have been she,” commented Solomon, “for she is a light-minded one, as is proper an’ becomin’ in a child of sin.”

The stranger looked up with a laugh from the moss-grown cattle trough beside which he was standing, and his eyes—­of a peculiar dark blue—­glanced merrily into the bleared ones of old Adam.