How carefully those young archers shot steepleward their arrows, first attaching to the latter a long, stout thread!
Oh, hands of the archers, tremble not! Oh, winds above, blow not! And—and—over, yes, just across the vane went the thread fastened to Walter Plympton’s arrow! A cord was now tied to the thread, the man carefully pulling it up, and then there went to him a new clothes–line, and down he came.
“And we are obleeged to you!” replied the sexton. “And here’s your money for the job.”
As the stranger turned to go away, he laid his hand on Walter’s shoulder, and said, “I saw it was your arrer that did the work. I won’t forgit it.”
Away he walked, disappearing down the road that wound its dusty line through the green forest.
All the time he had been with his new acquaintances, he had not given his name. Indeed, nobody asked for it. Walter remembered him only as a man with a bushy beard.
“Wonder if I shall ever see him again!” thought Walter.
The weeks slipped by, and winter at last powdered the land as if it wished to give the earth’s bald head a white wig.
“I’m going to be warm,” said Walter Plympton’s father, a man with rather sharp features, of slender build, and nervous, sensitive temperament. “Yes, I’m going to be warm, and bundle up accordingly.”
“You will look like an Eskimo,” replied his wife, who in her very laugh, so easy and deliberate, as well as in her stout physical build, was the opposite of her husband. “Those who see you, Ezra, won’t fall in love with such a stuffed creature.”
“They may keep the love, Louisa, and I’ll hold on to the comfort. I believe in going warm like the Chinese, who are said in cold weather to increase the amount of their clothing, rather than their heating apparatus. How that may be, I don’t know; but I do know that I mean to be warm. Kitty harnessed, Walter?”
“Yes, father, and she’s waiting in the stable.”
“We will go out then. Oh, the family umbrella!”
The family umbrella was an immense institution, suspended like a big blue dome above its holder, and promising to make a good parachute. It had been bought at an auction, and was one of those peculiarities often coming up to the surface at such sales. For years, it had proved a good friend on rough, rainy days.