A middle-aged farm woman, tired of keeping house for a brother who has become a famous author of rustic sketches, buys a travelling bookshop — horse, van and stock — from the little red-bearded man driving it, and takes to the roads of New England selling literature door to door. Morley was a Rhodes Scholar and a founder of the Saturday Review who adored books to the point of writing this in 1917 as a love letter to selling them.