was that not of a cave but of a brook, bound with ice, yet hardly the less itself beneath its fetters, bright, clear, cool. By the end of May, when I returned, the covering ice had melted and my neighbor, sitting upon his porch, greeted me with his customary zest.

It was on this May afternoon that I first discovered how little and how much he saw across his meadow and his swamp.

"I suppose," he said, "you can see the new leaves on the willows. I envy you. That has always seemed to me the loveliest green of the year, but I can't distinguish it any more from the other shades."

I knew him well enough to know he was not inviting sympathy, and I spoke of the willows, not of his eyes. And I was no less discreet when, later, he pointed to a noisy robin skirmishing in the grass only a few yards away.

"I could n't be sure it was a robin if I had n't heard it crying just now." He smiled at his own phrase. "When I was a child my mother said the robins sounded to her as if they were crying, and I have always thought of their song in that way."

We talked about the varied cries of birds. Then I noticed that his gaze was fixed again upon the meadow.

"Do you see that cloud-shadow coming toward us?" he asked. "I can guess almost to a second when it will reach the house. The shadows are my chief entertainment. If you watch you will see how they keep the valley always changing. Some days they are very leisurely. To-day they go like the wind. They are my moving pictures.'

over the ridge of the hills, rolled down the long slope, turned the row of maples a darker green as it touched them, swept solidly across the swamp and meadow, and went by us with what I almost thought was a swish. I half caught my breath. Similar shadows, I realized, must have been breaking over us all afternoon as we talked, and I had not noted them. Yet at a few quiet words from this quiet man they had become as tangible as a salt wave. He who saw so little that color had almost disappeared from the landscape for him, as well as all small objects unless they were nearly under his hand, saw so much that he had for me added a new spectacle to nature and had fixed it unforgetably in my consciousness. I found I had suddenly a changed conception of him. During the two summers in which I had daily seen him sitting on his porch looking out across the meadow I had imagined him as wrapped almost entirely in his own thoughts and memories. Now I knew that he had been subtly alive to the rapid patterns which the sun painted with so powerful though with so coarse a brush upon the wide canvas of the valley. He was a connoisseur whom I had not suspected.

"I have been troubled with my eyes this past winter," he told me without apologies, "but I think they are better lately. Certainly, though, I have little reason to complain. You probably do not know how near I came to losing my sight altogether. A few years ago I was so much troubled that I went to an oculist in Waterbury to have my eyes examined. He frightened me by telling me that I could not count on seeing anything for more

never forget how desperate I felt. On my way home I made a kind of compact with God. 'God,' I said, 'if you will keep me from going blind, I will never ask for another favor from you. I will be content with whatever else may come to me.' I can't say that I stopped with my prayer. I made myself spare my eyes in every way possible. I sat for hours day after day with my eyes closed. I did all I could to hold myself calm and steady. It was not always a simple thing to do, but I had more success than I really expected. As you see, I did not go blind. And I have never allowed myself to worry about any thing else that has happened since then, strong as the temptation is when I see the farm going to rack and ruin, with no one to do the work as it needs to be done. I mean to abide by my bargain."

I had never heard Matthew Bradford mention the name of God before, and I have never heard him mention it since, but I know what I need to know about his religion.

& 2

Reading, he told me, had been permitted him at intervals this spring, and he had gone through the three volumes of "Jean-Christophe." I reI remember the surprise with which I heard him mention the book. Though he pronounced its title, and the name of its author, in the fashion of one who was quite ignorant of French, he had heartily enjoyed it.

"That is a world," he said, "about which I of course know nothing. But I found it very interesting to follow the young man through all his adventures. The strange thing is, that I felt at home. The people in the book

must be real, for I have seen people like most of them here in Cornwall or in Waterbury."

At various times I have offered to read to him, but he generally prefers to talk. "I can read in the winter. I would rather talk when I have a chance to." The things he says are always reflective and never speculative. Full of serene curiosity as he is, he has been neither a reader nor a traveler. His actual topics are his observations in Connecticut and particularly in Cornwall.

One day when I was driving with him to his favorite spring I asked him the name of a certain hill in the neighborhood. "I don't know," he said after a moment. "I ought to know, for I was a member of the committee which named all our hills a good many years ago. But I have forgotten. Perhaps it does n't matter. They had got along without names so long that the names seem not to stick to them very tight in their old age-any more than they do to my memory." That same day, as we were passing a rough boulder which juts out over the Hollow Road, Matthew Bradford smiled. "I can tell you more about that rock than I can about the hill. The last wolf ever seen in Cornwall, so far as I know, was standing on the top of the rock when my father came by here. Not long after that, when I was still a small boy, I was hunting the cows and had to crawl under the rock to keep out of a terrible rain. I can remember yet how much afraid I was that the wolf was somewhere around. If he was, he liked me less than the rain. But, then, I have always found Cornwall a safe place to live in. Probably it is safer now than it was when

I was a boy, when it had twice as large a population as it has to-day. There are some, no doubt, who find it so safe that it is tiresome."

Thus, without discoursing formally upon the town's past, he manages to open up vistas into it, and to bind past and present together with vivid links. It is the same when he speaks of the men and women who have lived here. "Most of the stone walls in Cornwall," he told me, "were built by an Indian who was very expert in that art. He spent his life building them, and covered the whole town with his monuments." I am not sure whether my neighbor feels how ironical it is that an Indian should have marked the boundaries of the newcomers who had dispossessed his race, but I hesitate to doubt it; I know that the irony of the fact was communicated to me. Again Matthew Bradford said: "The Warwick men who used to own your house were all large, strong men with thick beards who liked the heaviest work best. It was said of them that if they had enough hard cider, they would undertake to move mountains; but they never had enough, so the mountains stayed where they were." I remembered the enormous timbers in my barns and the flag-stones in my walks, and had a sense of dim giants tugging at them.

Matthew Bradford's observations, however, are not all in the heroic key. "You should have known old Mrs. Warwick, the mother of the last Warwick who lived in your house. She was not very devout and she had a sharp tongue. Once the minister went to call on her, as he called on every one in his parish. She liked the news of the congregation when she could get it, but she never went to church,

because she had a poor opinion of that particular minister. When he told her that there had recently been a fire in the church, she said, 'I cal'late it did n't start in the pulpit.' He enjoyed the joke and told me about it."

With the same delight in the comedy of existence this kindly spectator has hit off for me most of our contemporaries in Cornwall. He is disillusioned without being bitter. I have never caught the note of scorn in his discourses. It is possibly for the reason that I am farm-bred that he admits me to considerable intimacy with him, but he shows no signs of thinking often, as some of the farmers do, about the distinction between them and the summer residents. All such minor differences have long ceased to weigh with him, if they ever did. Of a certain pompous neighbor of ours Matthew Bradford once told me that the man reminded him of "a statue of Daniel Webster rolling itself around on castors." But this is nearer to wit than he frequently comes. Of another, who is extraordinarily dull and inarticulate, I heard my old friend say, "His wife may find his conversation interesting, but I find his silence the most interesting thing about him.” For the most part, however, these comments upon the neighbors are simple narratives, of their births, marriages, children, goings and comings, accomplishments and qualities. “The man who works for me is a Doty. In Cornwall we say 'once a Doty, always a Doty.' The first members of the family came here with the original settlers nearly two hundred years ago; came as hired men. They have been hired men ever since. Now and then one of them shows promise or marries an unusually ambitious woman, and

it looks as if the spell would be broken. But so far it never has been. Sooner or later the Doty blood seems to tell, and the man turns out to be shiftless after all. The Doty women are sometimes better than the men. The unfortunate thing is that they almost always marry with their own kin or with others of the same stripe. Then their children are Dotys too, whatever their names. This man of mine started out very well, on his own account, and he certainly married an industrious woman. She has made it hard for him to be as much of a Doty as he might like to be, but if you will watch the son at work for half an hour you will see that the father has had his revenge."

I am so accustomed to seeing Cornwall partially through the eyes of my friend that I was shocked, I remember, the first time I realized that Cornwall also has eyes through which it looks at him. I stood talking with a former Cornwall man, who now lives in New Haven, when Matthew Bradford drove slowly by.

"That 's an interesting old codger," my visitor said. "Quite a character. He had a good deal of money once, but it slipped through his fingers. Some people around here wonder where it all went to."

Inwardly I winced at the insinuation that there may have been creditors whose claims were not considered, though I did not in the least believe it. I winced even more at the assumption that this wise and good man was merely another rustic type. At the same time I had to admit to myself that his antique dignity, his Roman stoicism, was far from being

evident that day to the casual observer. His clothes were weatherbeaten and characterless, his shoulders bent, his beard untended; his purple old hands shook a little as they slapped the reins over the sluggish horse that drew his mud-splashed buggy. This perfunctory exterior, indeed, is habitual with him and must have held at a distance many of those who suppose they knew him. Despite the eminence of his mind, he might possibly by some observers be estimated as merely one more vote in the town meeting. What pressure of life must have been called for to discipline him to this pitch of inconspicuousness!

My curiosity aroused, I cautiously inquired of the other neighbor in whom I had once thought to find a Yankee of the old breed. But though he is both inquisitive and garrulous, he had nothing to tell me. "They say Matthew was a wild one in his time," he said, "but I never see him up to any mischief." I could believe that Matthew Bradford had been circumspect; I had to study him again to determine whether I could accept the legend of his gay youth. I thought I could. With a little imagination I could fill out his shrunken frame to the dimensions of a powerful youth, sinewy and lusty, who must have delighted in bodily activity and must have felt the sting of all his appetites.

Love, for instance, may well have tugged at him. I feel sure he attracted it. Nothing about him so clings to my memory as a thing he told me in this connection. I had stopped to call on him one bright September day and had found him sitting as usual with his gaze apparently upon his meadow. But he

seemed to be brooding softly upon some unusual memory.

"A very singular thing happened yesterday. A woman whom I knew when I was a young man came all the way from Albany to visit me. I had n't met her for many years, since she was married and went away from Cornwall. She told me that her husband died some time ago and left her with a comfortable income and no obligations, so she is indulging in all the things she wants to do before she is too feeble to do them. One of them, she said, was to come back to Cornwall and talk over old times with me. 'If I were younger,' she told me, 'I might not have sense enough to visit Matthew. But I am old enough now to know my own mind and go. I would n't die happy if I had n't seen him again.' So here she was. She had dinner with me, though it was n't much of a dinner, and stayed all afternoon. I don't know what either of us knew that we did n't tell each other. She is still very energetic, with all her faculties as fresh as ever, I thought, and very good company.'

He sat silent for several moments, while I waited to see if there was more to his story.

"You will think it strange of me to say such a thing, but do you know, I believe that woman loved me. I had never dreamed of it."

Thinking later upon the episode, I was struck to find how natural it had seemed to me for Matthew Bradford to say these words. He was as far beyond any mean fear of betraying his emotions as was the woman who had come upon her touching pilgrimage. But I could not help wondering whether, along with the kind mem

ories which she had awakened in him, there was not also some stir of rebellion against his weakness and loneliness. He could hardly have become so rich and generous in his wisdom without building it upon the conquest of powerful passions. of powerful passions. Are the wars between his passions and his wisdom, I asked myself, all ended?

I asked myself, but I ask no longer. This past summer when I went to Cornwall I found him gradually recovering from an illness which had been all but fatal. Barely able to sit erect, he sat in the sun, his eyes only now and then lifted to the meadow and swamp. His voice was the same

as ever, but his words were very few. I congratulated him upon his recov ery. He looked at me as if I had said some childish thing.

"Yes, the doctor did an excellent job of it, I believe, and Mrs. Doty is praised by every one for her devotion as a nurse. But I find it very hard to forgive them. They had a chance to let me die and they did not let me. Now I must wait for another winter."

Almost at once he turned the conversation to casual matters, but for a minute I had seen the depth of his weariness and his rebellion. In that moment he was not the gentle, wise old man I have ordinarily known. He was a man whose soul, in irons, cried out against its dreadful bondage. Whatever was too soft, too diffused, in the picture which I had drawn of him for myself was corrected. I cannot think of him now without remembering that day when he, as it were, took the pencil out of my hand and drew around my picture that swift, biting outline which fixes it forever in my memory.