“Yes, I know the place.  It is beyond the river, up that steep road running into the sky, in the next adjoining hill town.  I doubt if you find any one there who lays it much to heart.  But you can see the mill.”

“What is the Mountain Miller?” asked Evelyn.

“A tract that, when I was a girl,” answered Miss McDonald, “used to be bound up with ‘The Dairyman’s Daughter’ and ’The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.’  It was the first thing that interested me in New England.”

“Well,” said Philip, “it isn’t much.  Just a tract.  But it was written by Parson Halleck, a great minister and a sort of Pope in this region for fifty years.  It is, so far as I know, the only thing of his that remains.”

This tractarian movement was interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Mavick.

“Good-morning, Mr. Burnett.  I’ve been down to see Jenkins about his picnic wagon.  Carries six, besides the driver and my man, and the hampers.  So, you see, Miss Alice will have to go.  We couldn’t go rattling along half empty.  I’ll go up and see her this afternoon.  So, that’s settled.  Now about the time and place.  You are the director.  Let’s sit down and plan it out.  It looks like good weather for a week.”

“Miss McDonald says she wants to see the Mountain Miller,” said Philip, with a smile.

“What’s that?  A monument like your Pulpit Rock?”

“No, a tract about a miller.”

“Ah, something religious.  I never heard of it.  Well, perhaps we had better begin with something secular, and work round to that.”

So an excursion was arranged for the next day.  And as Philip walked home, thinking how brilliant Evelyn had been in their little talk, he began to dramatize the excursion.

All excursions are much alike, exhilarating in the outset, rarely up to expectation in the object, wearisome in the return; but, nevertheless, delightful in the memory, especially if attended with some hardship or slight disaster.  To be free, in the open air, and for a day unconventional and irresponsible, is the sufficient justification of a country picnic; but its common attraction is in the opportunity for bringing young persons of the opposite sex into natural and unrestrained relations.  To Philip it was the first time in his life that a picnic had ever seemed a defensible means of getting rid of a day.

The two persons to whom this excursion was most novel and exciting were Evelyn and the elder maiden, Alice, who sat together and speedily developed a sympathy with each other in the enjoyment of the country, and in a similar poetic temperament, very shy on the part of Alice and very frank on the part of Evelyn.  The whole wild scene along the river was quite as novel to Alice as to the city girl, because, although she was familiar with every mile of it and had driven through it a hundred times, she had never in all her life before, of purpose, gone to see it.  No doubt she had felt its wildness and beauty, but now for the