The Captains Toll-Gate | Page 9

the toll-gate, and its obvious disadvantages.

It was on a morning in early summer, when the garden had grown to be
so red and white and yellow in its flowers, and so green in its leaves
and stalks, that the box which edged the path was beginning to be
unnoticed, that a girl sat in a small arbor standing on a slight elevation
at one side of the garden, and from which a view could be had both up
and down the road. She was rather a slim girl, though tall enough; her
hair was dark, her eyes were blue, and she sat on the back of a rustic
bench with her feet resting upon the seat; this position she had taken
that she might the better view the road.
With both her hands this girl held a small telescope which she was
endeavoring to fix upon a black spot a mile or more away upon the
road. It was difficult for her to hold the telescope steadily enough to
keep the object-glass upon the black spot, and she had a great deal of
trouble in the matter of focusing, pulling out and pushing in the smaller
cylinder in a manner which showed that she was not accustomed to the
use of this optical instrument.
"Field-glasses are ever so much better," she said to herself; "you can
screw them to any point you want. But now I've got it. It is very near
that cross-road. Good! it did not turn there; it is coming along the pike,
and there will be toll to pay. One horse, seven cents."
She put down the telescope as if to rest her arm and eye. Presently,
however, she raised the glass again. "Now, let us see," she said, "Uncle
John? Jane? or me?" After directing the glass to a point in the air about
two hundred feet above the approaching vehicle, and then to another
point half a mile to the right of it, she was fortunate enough to catch
sight of it again. "I don't know that queer-looking horse," she said. "It
must be some stranger, and Jane will do. No, a little boy is driving.
Strangers coming along this road would not be driven by little boys. I
expect I shall have to call Uncle John." Then she put down the glass
and rubbed her eye, after which, with unassisted vision, she gazed
along the road. "I can see a great deal better without that old thing," she
continued. "There's a woman in that carriage. I'll go myself." With this
she jumped down from the rustic seat, and with the telescope under her
arm, she skipped through the garden to the little tollhouse.
The name of this girl was Olive Asher. Captain John Asher, who took
the toll, was her uncle, and she had now been living with him for about
six weeks. Olive was what is known in certain social circles as a navy

girl. About twenty years before she had come to her uncle's she had
been born in Genoa, her father at the time being a lieutenant on an
American war-vessel lying in the harbor of Villa Franca. Her first
schooldays were passed in the south of France, and she spent some
subsequent years in a German school in Dresden. Here she was
supposed to have finished her education but when her father's ship was
stationed on our Pacific coast and Olive and her mother went to San
Francisco they associated a great deal with army people, and here the
girl learned so much more of real life and her own country people that
the few years she spent in the far West seemed like a post-graduate
course, as important to her true education as any of the years she had
spent in schools.
After the death of her mother, when Olive was about eighteen, the girl
had lived with relatives, East and West, hoping for the day when her
father's three years' cruise would terminate, and she could go and make
a home for him in some pleasant spot on shore. Now, in the course of
these family visits she had come to stay with her father's brother, John
Asher, who kept the toll-gate on the Glenford pike.
Captain John Asher was an older man than his brother, the naval officer,
but he was in the prime of life, and able to hold the command of a ship
if he had cared to do it. But having been in the merchant service for a
long time, and having made some money, he had determined to leave
the sea and to settle on shore; and, finding this commodious house by
the toll-gate, he settled there. There were some people who said that he
had taken the position of toll-gate keeper because