to sit round a large vat where the juice of fresh apples came trickling through some sort of burlap squeezing coils, and where fat and groggy wasps buzzed and tottered and expired in rapture. These youths (who should not be blamed, for indeed they had few responsibilities and cares) would ply the flagon with diligence, merrily toasting the trolleys that hummed by on the way to West Chester. We will not give away their names, for they are now demure and respected merchants and lawyers and members of Rotary clubs and stock exchanges. But we remember one of these who was notably susceptible to cider. On the homeward path, as he flourished his intellect broadcast and quoted Maeterlinck and Bliss Carman, he was induced by his comrades to crawl inside a large terra-cotta pipe that lay by the roadside. Just how this act of cozening was accomplished we forget; perhaps it was a wager to see whether he, being proud of his slender figure, was slim enough to eel through the tube. At any rate, he vanished inside. The pipe lay at the top of a gentle hill, and for his companions it was the work of an inspired moment to seize the cylinder and set it rolling down the grade. Merrily it revolved for a hundred feet or more, at high velocity, and culbutted into a ditch. The dizzied victim emerged at length, quoting Rabelais.
The mile and a half along the creek above this sawmill—up to where an odd little branch railroad crosses the stream on a tottery trestle and Ithan
