“Evidently she lives in the town or in the neighborhood.  Shall I meet her again, I wonder?  I will stay here a week or a month if—­What nonsense!  I must have distinguished myself, staring at her like a gawk.  When she said she was the Queen of Sheba, I ought instantly to have replied—­what in the deuce is it I ought to have replied?  How can a man be witty with a ton of sole-leather pressing on his spine!”

Edward Lynde, with the girl and her mocking words in his mind, and busying himself with all the clever things he might have said and did not say, mechanically traversed the remaining distance to the village.

The street which had seemed thronged when he viewed it from the slope of the hill was deserted; at the farther end he saw two or three persons hurrying along, but there were no indications whatever of the festival he had conjectured.  Indeed, the town presented the appearance of a place smitten by a pestilence.  The blinds of the lower casements of all the houses were closed; he would have supposed them unoccupied if he had not caught sight of a face pressed against the glass of an upper window here and there.  He thought it singular that these faces instantly withdrew when he looked up.  Once or twice he fancied he heard a distant laugh, and the sound of voices singing drunkenly somewhere in the open air.

Some distance up the street a tall liberty-pole sustaining a swinging sign announced a tavern.  Lynde hastened thither; but the tavern, like the private houses, appeared tenantless; the massive pine window-shutters were barred and bolted.  Lynde mounted the three or four low steps leading to the piazza, and tried the front door, which was locked.  With the saddle still on his shoulders, he stepped into the middle of the street to reconnoitre the premises.  A man and two women suddenly showed themselves at an open window in the second story.  Lynde was about to address them when the man cried out—­

“Oh, you’re a horse, I suppose.  Well, there isn’t any oats for you here.  You had better trot on!”

Lynde did not relish this pleasantry; it struck him as rather insolent; but he curbed his irritation, and inquired as politely as he could if a horse or any kind of vehicle could be hired in the village.

The three persons in the window nodded to one another significantly, and began smiling in a constrained manner, as if there were something quite preposterous in the inquiry.  The man, a corpulent, red-faced person, seemed on the point of suffocating with merriment.

“Is this a public house?” demanded Lynde severely.

“That’s as may be,” answered the man, recovering his breath, and becoming grave.

“Are you the proprietor?”

“That’s jest what I am.”

“Then I require of you the accommodation which is the right of every traveller.  Your license does not permit you to turn any respectable stranger from your door.”