The apple orchard—­where Dolly was stung by the bee—­was set on a fine breezy place at the brow of the hill with the valley in full sight.  The trees themselves were old and decayed, but they were gnarled and crotched for easy climbing.  And the apples—­in particular a russet—­mounted to a delicacy.  On the other side of the valley, a half mile off as a bird would fly, were the buildings of a convent, and if you waited you might hear the twilight bell.  To this day all distant bells come to my ears with a pleasing softness, as though they had been cast in a quieter world.  Stone arrow-heads were found in a near-by field as often as the farmer turned up the soil in plowing.  And because of this, a long finger of land that put off to the valley, was called Indian Point.  Here, with an arm for pillow, one might lie for a long hour on a sunny morning and watch the shadows of clouds move across the lowland.  A rooster crows somewhere far off—­surely of all sounds the drowsiest.  A horse in a field below lifts up its head and neighs.  The leaves practice a sleepy tune.  If one has the fortune to keep awake, here he may lie and think the thoughts that are born of sun and wind.

And now, although it is not yet noon, hunger rages in us.  The pancakes, the syrup, the toast and the other incidents of breakfast have disappeared the way the rabbit vanishes when the magician waves his hand.  The horrid Polyphemus did not so crave his food.  And as yet there is no comforting sniff from the kitchen.  Scrubbing and other secular matters engage the farmer’s wife.  There is as yet not a faintest gurgle in the kettle.

To divert ourselves, we climb three trees and fall out of one.  Is twelve o’clock never to come?  Have Time and the Hour grown stagnant?  We eat apples and throw the cores at the pig to hear him grunt.  Is the great round sun stuck?  Have the days of Joshua come again?  We walk a rail fence.  Is it not yet noon?  Shrewsbury clock itself—­reputed by scholars the slowest of all possible clocks—­could not so hold off.  I snag myself—­but it is nothing that shows when I sit.

Ah!  At last!  My grandfather is calling from the house.  We run back and find that the lunch is ready and is laid upon a table with a red oil-cloth cover.  We apply ourselves.  Silence....

The journey home started about five o’clock.  There was one game we always played.  Each of us, having wisely squinted at the sky, made a reckoning and guessed where we would be when the sun set.  My grandfather might say the high bridge.  I named the Sherman House.  But my brother, being precise, judged it to a fraction of a telegraph pole.  Beyond a certain turn—­did we remember?—­well, it would be exactly sixteen telegraph poles further on.  What an excitement there was when the sun’s lower rim was already below the horizon!  We stood on our knees and looked through the little window at the back of the phaeton.  With what suspicion we regarded my grandfather’s driving!  Or if Dolly lagged, did it not raise a thought that she, too, was in the plot against us?  The sun sets.  We cry out the victor.