But--I was thinking of my uncle--of the people in our village at home.

What you said of Protestants seemed to me, all at once, so odd--so ridiculous!' 'Did it?
Tell me then about the people in your valley at home.' And turning on his elbows beside her, he put her through a catechism as to her village, her uncle, her friends.

She resisted a little, for the brusque assurance of his tone still sounded oddly in her American ear.

But he was not easy to resist; and when she had yielded she soon discovered that to talk to him was a no less breathless and absorbing business than to listen to him.

He pounced on the new, the characteristic, the local; he drew out of her what he wanted to know; he made her see her own trees and fields, the figures of her home, with new sharpness, so quick, so dramatic, so voracious, one might almost say, were his own perceptions.
Especially did he make her tell him of the New England winter; of the long pauses of its snow-bound life; its whirling winds and drifts; its snapping, crackling frosts; the lonely farms, and the deep sleigh-tracks amid the white wilderness, that still in the winter silence bind these homesteads to each other and the nation; the strange gleams of moonrise and sunset on the cold hills; the strong dark armies of the pines; the grace of the stripped birches.