polished every day.  Then my health went back on me.  The doctor told me to get into the open air.  By and by I got this idea of a travelling bookstore.  I had always been a lover of books, and in the days when I boarded out among the farmers I used to read aloud to them.  After my mother died I built the wagon to suit my own ideas, bought a stock of books from a big second-hand store in Baltimore, and set out.  Parnassus just about saved my life I guess.”

He pushed his faded old cap back on his head and relit his pipe.  I clicked to Pegasus and we rumbled gently off over the upland, looking down across the pastures.  Distant cow bells sounded tankle-tonk among the bushes.  Across the slope of the hill I could see the road winding away to Redfield.  Somewhere along that road Andrew would be rolling back toward home and roast pork with apple sauce; and here was I, setting out on the first madness of my life without even a qualm.

“Miss McGill,” said the little man, “this rolling pavilion has been wife, doctor, and religion to me for seven years.  A month ago I would have scoffed at the thought of leaving her; but somehow it’s come over me I need a change.  There’s a book I’ve been yearning to write for a long time, and I need a desk steady under my elbows and a roof over my head.  And silly as it seems, I’m crazy to get back to Brooklyn.  My brother and I used to live there as kids.  Think of walking over the old Bridge at sunset and seeing the towers of Manhattan against a red sky!  And those old gray cruisers down in the Navy Yard!  You don’t know how tickled I am to sell out.  I’ve sold a lot of copies of your brother’s books and I’ve often thought he’d be the man to buy Parnassus if I got tired of her.”

“So he would,” I said.  “Just the man.  He’d be only too likely to—­and go maundering about in this jaunting car and neglect the farm.  But tell me about selling books.  How much profit do you make out of it?  We’ll be passing Mrs. Mason’s farm, by and by, and we might as well sell her something just to make a start.”

“It’s very simple,” he said.  “I replenish my stock whenever I go through a big town.  There’s always a second-hand bookstore somewhere about, where you can pick up odds and ends.  And every now and then I write to a wholesaler in New York for some stuff.  When I buy a book I mark in the back just what I paid for it, then I know what I can afford to sell it for.  See here.”

He pulled up a book from behind the seat—­a copy of “Lorna Doone” it was—­and showed me the letters a m scrawled in pencil in the back.

“That means that I paid ten cents for this.  Now, if you sell it for a quarter you’ve got a safe profit.  It costs me about four dollars a week to run Parnassus—­generally less.  If you clear that much in six days you can afford to lay off on Sundays!”

“How do you know that a m stands for ten cents?” I asked.

“The code word’s manuscript.  Each letter stands for a figure, from 0 up to 9, see?” He scrawled it down on a scrap of paper: