THE DREAM AND THE REAL The following Friday Abel drove Blossom in his gig to the house of her school friend in Applegate, where she was to remain for a week.

On his way home he stopped at the store for a bottle of harness oil, and catching the red glow of the fire beyond the threshold of the public room, he went in for a moment to ask old Adam Doolittle about a supply of hominy meal he had ready for him at the mill.

As the ancient man crouched over the fire, with his bent hands outstretched and his few silvery hairs rising in the warmth, his profile showed with the exaggeration of a twelfth century grotesque, the features so distorted by the quivering shadows that his beaked nose appeared to rest in the crescent-shaped silhouette of his chin.

His mouth was open, and from time to time he shook his head and muttered to himself in an undertone--a habit he had fallen into during the monotonous stretches of Mr.Mullen's sermons.

Across from him sat Jim Halloween, and in the middle of the hearth, Solomon Hatch stood wiping the frost from his face with a red cotton handkerchief.
"It's time you were thinkin' about goin' home, I reckon, old Adam," remarked Mrs.Bottom.