APPLE ORCHARD IN FULL BLOOM 101 
hand wearing white kid gloves. Honestly, that 
would make a mummy laugh. White kid gloves 
on these hands! Positively, that is past jest; 
that is insult. This man in evening clothes? 
Cease such suggestions, lest the poet-farmer and 
I both grow angry and throw you from these 
premises, landing you where you belong in the 
rubbish heap for the spring freshets to wash away. 
We are shaking hands, the poet-farmer and I. 
And his hat is a work of art. It is a high art, 
seeing it is at the top of this man. There is where 
a hat should stay. It was a derby which was 
a psychological blunder as well as a caput-al- 
mistake, but I think it had been bought by his 
wife or hired man at a bargain sale; for I would 
exonerate him from having chosen it. This 
should have been a soft hat. That settles on 
your head and to it like suds about your hands 
at the washing. You can sit on it and not in- 
dent it. You can wad it up and throw it at a 
mule and not disfigure the mule much nor your 
hat any. This hat was, so to say, homogeneous, if 
at times a little incoherent, incoherency caught, 
I think, from the brain of the wearer. This 
orchard hat was a derby, but an old one. Thank 
goodness! Age will dignify even a derby hat, on 
which I remark that after that, no wonderwork 
may be thought impossible to age. There was 
an indentation on one side thereof as if an apple 
tree in a storm had blown against it. The hat 
had an inebriated look as if the smell of the 
