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“And then,” cried Mary breathlessly, “what did they do then?”

“And then,” her father obediently continued, “the two doughty knights smote lustily with their swords. And each smote the other on the helmet and clove him to the middle. It was a fair battle and sightly.”

But Mary’s interest was unabated. “And then,” she urged, “what did they do then?”

“Not much, I think. Even a knight of the Table Round stops fighting for a while when that happens to him.”

“Didn’t they do anything ‘tall?” the audience insisted. “You aren’t leaving it out, are you? Didn’t they bleed nor nothing?”

“Oh, yes, they bled.”

“Then tell me that part.”

“Well, they bled. They never stinteth bleeding for three days and three nights until they were pale as the very earth for bleeding. And they made a great dole.”

“And then, when they couldn’t bleed any more nor make any more dole, what did they do?”

“They died.”

“And then–“

“That’s the end of the story,” said the narrator definitely.

“Then tell me another,” she pleaded, “and don’t let them die so soon.”

“There wouldn’t be time for another long one,” he pointed out as he encouraged his horse into an ambling trot. “We are nearly there now.”

“After supper will you tell me one?”

“Yes,” he promised.

“One about Lancelot and Elaine?”

“Yes,” he repeated. “Anything you choose.”

“I choose Lancelot,” she declared.

“A great many ladies did,” commented her father as the horse sedately stopped before the office of the Arcady Herald-Journal, of which he was day and night editor, sporting editor, proprietor, society editor, chief of the advertising department, and occasionally type-setter and printer and printer’s devil.

Mary held the horse, which stood in need of no such restraint, while this composite of newspaper secured his mail, and then they jogged off through the spring sunshine, side by side, in the ramshackle old buggy on a leisurely canvass of outlying districts in search of news or advertisements, or suggestions for the forthcoming issue.

In the wide-set, round, opened eyes of his small daughter, Herbert Buckley was the most wonderful person in the world. No stories were so enthralling as his. No songs so tuneful, no invention so fertile, no temper so sweet, no companionship so precious. And her nine happy years of life had shown her no better way of spending summer days or winter evenings than in journeying, led by his hand and guided by his voice, through the pleasant ways of Camelot and the shining times of chivalry.

Upon a morning later in this ninth summer of her life Mary was perched high up in an apple tree enjoying the day, the green apples, and herself. The day was a glorious one in mid July, the apples were of a wondrous greenness and hardness, and Mary, for the first time in many weeks, was free to enjoy her own society. A month ago a grandmother and a maiden aunt had descended out of the land which had until then given forth only letters, birthday presents, and Christmas cards. And they had proved to be not at all the idyllic creatures which these manifestations had seemed to prophesy, but a pair of very interfering old ladies with a manner of over-ruling Mary’s gentle mother, brow-beating her genial father and cloistering herself.

This morning had contributed another female assuming airs of instant intimacy. She had gone up to the last remaining spare chamber, donned a costume all of crackling white linen, and had introduced herself, entirely uninvited, into the dim privacy of Mary’s mother’s room, whence Mary had been sternly banished.

“Another aunt!” was the outcast’s instant inference, as in a moment of accountable preoccupation on the part of the elders she had escaped to her own happy and familiar country–the world of out-of-doors–where female relatives seldom intruded, and where the lovely things of life were waiting.

When she had consumed all the green apples her constitution would accept, and they seemed pitifully few to her more robust mind, she descended from the source of her refreshment and set out upon a comprehensive tour of her domain. She liked living upon the road to Camelot. It made life interesting to be within measurable distance of the knights and ladies who lived and played and loved in the many-towered city of which one could gain so clear a view from the topmost branches of the hickory tree in the upper pasture. She liked to crouch in the elder bushes where a lane, winding and green-arched, crossed a corner of the cornfield, and to wait, through the long, still summer mornings for Lancelot or Galahad or Tristram or some other of her friends to come pricking his way through the sunshine. She could hear the clinking of his golden armor, the whinnying of his steed, the soft brushing of the branches as they parted before his helmet or his spear; the rustling of the daisies against his great white charger’s feet. And then there was the river “where the aspens dusk and quiver,” and where barges laden with sweet ladies passed and left ripples of foam on the water and ripples of light laughter in the air as, brilliant and fair bedight, they went winding down to Camelot.