We had become land owners overnight.  My income had increased, of course; but so had my liabilities.  The first few years of that new house taxed our ingenuity more than once.  We spent now and then, not money which we had, but money which we were going to get; but it was buying happiness.  If ever a couple have found real happiness in this world we found it under the roof of that Leicester Court home.

There nearly all that has brought joy and peace and contentment into our lives was born to us.  It was from there I began to progress; it was there my publishers found me; and it was there little Bud was born to us.  We are out of it now.  We left it for a big reason; but we drive by it often just to see it; for it is still ours in the precious memory of the years we spent within its walls.

Still, in the beginning, it was just a house!  It had no associations and no history.  It had been built to sell.  The people who paid for its construction saw in its growing walls and rooftree only the few hundred dollars they hoped to gain.  It was left to us to change that house into a home.  It sounds preachy, I know, to say that all buildings depend for their real beauty upon the spirit of the people who inhabit them.  But it is true.

As the weeks and months slipped by, the new house began to soften and mellow under Mother’s gentle touches.  The living-room assumed an air of comfort; my books now had a real corner of their own; the guest-chamber—­or, rather, the little spare-room—­already had entertained its transient tenants; and as our friends came and went the walls caught something from them all, to remind us of their presence.

I took to gardening.  The grounds were small, but they were large enough to teach me the joy of an intimate friendship with growing things.  To-day, in my somewhat larger garden, I have more than one hundred and fifty rosebushes, and twenty or thirty peony clumps, and I know their names and their habits.  The garden has become a part of the home.  It is not yet the garden I dream of, nor even the garden which I think it will be next year; but it is the place where play divides the ground with beauty.  What Bud doesn’t require for a baseball diamond the roses possess.

Early one morning in July, Bud came to us.  Immediately, the character of that front bedroom was changed.  It was no longer just “our bedroom;” it was “the room where Bud was born.”  Of all the rooms in all the houses of all the world, there is none so gloriously treasured in the memories of man and woman as those wherein their children have come to birth.

I have had many fine things happen to me:  Friends have borne me high on kindly shoulders; out of the depths of their generous hearts they have given me honors which I have not deserved; I have more than once come home proud in the possession of some new joy, or of some task accomplished; but I have never known, and never shall know, a thrill of happiness to equal that which followed good old Doctor Gordon’s brief announcement:  “It’s a Boy!”