and ground to meal that isn’t planted, and along as when the kernels in the ground begins to swell and sprout, this other corn knows it and begins to heave and sweat, and if it isn’t handled careful-like, and taken in the air and cooled, it’ll take on all sorts of moulds and musts, and like as not turn useless.  I holds it’s just the same with folks,—­when springtime comes they fetch up restless and need the air and turning out to sweeten in the sun until they settle down again, else their naturs turn sour, pisen’us, and unwholesome, breedin’ worms like sweated corn!’

“Since then I’ve heard it here and there in other words, but always the same motive, the old miller holding it all fact and no legend at all, saying that if he can keep his surplus corn from sweating and well aired through May and June, he never fears for it in the damper, more potent August heat.  One thing is certain, that in my practice in countryside, village, and town, if strange doings break out and restless discontentment arises, it is never in winter, when I should expect partial torpidity to breed unrest, but in the pushing season of renewal, and, as the old man terms it, ‘corn sweating.’”

* * * * *

A little later I was going toward the garden when father called after me to say that he was soon starting for a long trip, quite up to Pine Ridge, and that if I cared to go, taking a lunch for both, it might give me a chance to “turn and sweeten” in the sun and cure my restlessness with natural motion.

Go?  Of course my heart leaped at the very thought, because, in spite of the boys, those long drives with father have grown more precious as they grow more rare.  But where were the twins?  They had disappeared under my very eyes; of a surety they must be at Martha’s, but my conscience smote me when, on glancing at the clock, I saw that it was two hours since they left the breakfast table in their brand-new sailor suits, with the intention of showing them to her.

No, they were not at Martha’s, and she came hurrying back with me, a very clucking hen of alarm.  Timothy Saunders, who had by that time brought round the horses in the stanhope, ventured the opinion that they might be below, paddling in the duck pond, as all the village children gathered there at the first warm weather, “jest fer all the world like gnats the sun’s drawd oot.”

They were not there!  Father had disappeared to make some preparations for the drive, and so I asked Timothy to drive with me along the highway toward the village.  I did not feel exactly worried, but then one never knows.

We had gone half a mile perhaps, vainly questioning every one, when I spied two small figures coming across a field from the east, where the ground fell lower and lower for a mile or so until it reached salt water.