Several times I have passed John Starkweather’s home.  It lies between my farm and the town, though not on the direct road, and it is really beautiful with the groomed and guided beauty possible to wealth.  A stately old house with a huge end chimney of red brick stands with dignity well back from the road; round about lie pleasant lawns that once were cornfields:  and there are drives and walks and exotic shrubs.  At first, loving my own hills so well, I was puzzled to understand why I should also enjoy Starkweather’s groomed surroundings.  But it came to me that after all, much as we may love wildness, we are not wild, nor our works.  What more artificial than a house, or a barn, or a fence?  And the greater and more formal the house, the more formal indeed must be the nearer natural environments.  Perhaps the hand of man might well have been less evident in developing the surroundings of the Starkweather home—­for art, dealing with nature, is so often too accomplished!

But I enjoy the Starkweather place and as I look in from the road, I sometimes think to myself with satisfaction:  “Here is this rich man who has paid his thousands to make the beauty which I pass and take for nothing—­and having taken, leave as much behind.”  And I wonder sometimes whether he, inside his fences, gets more joy of it than I, who walk the roads outside.  Anyway, I am grateful to him for using his riches so much to my advantage.

On fine mornings John Starkweather sometimes comes out in his slippers, bare-headed, his white vest gleaming in the sunshine, and walks slowly around his garden.  Charles Baxter says that on these occasions he is asking his gardener the names of the vegetables.  However that may be, he has seemed to our community the very incarnation of contentment and prosperity—­his position the acme of desirability.

What was my astonishment, then, the other morning to see John Starkweather coming down the pasture lane through my farm.  I knew him afar off, though I had never met him.  May I express the inexpressible when I say he had a rich look; he walked rich, there was richness in the confident crook of his elbow, and in the positive twitch of the stick he carried:  a man accustomed to having doors opened before he knocked.  I stood there a moment and looked up the hill at him, and I felt that profound curiosity which every one of us feels every day of his life to know something of the inner impulses which stir his nearest neighbour.  I should have liked to know John Starkweather; but I thought to myself as I have thought so many times how surely one comes finally to imitate his surroundings.  A farmer grows to be a part of his farm; the sawdust on his coat is not the most distinctive insignia of the carpenter; the poet writes his truest lines upon his own countenance.  People passing in my road take me to be a part of this natural scene.  I suppose I seem to them as a partridge squatting among dry grass and leaves, so like the grass and leaves as to be invisible.  We all come to be marked upon by nature and dismissed—­how carelessly!—­as genera or species.  And is it not the primal struggle of man to escape classification, to form new differentiations?