To make it seem all the more primitive there is a rickety old diligence which runs from Quincy—­Huiry is really a suburb of Quincy—­to Esbly twice a day, to connect with trains for Paris with which the branch road does not connect.  It has an imperial, and when you come out to see me, at some future time, you will get a lovely view of the country from a top seat.  You could walk the four miles quicker than the horse does,—­it is uphill nearly all the way,—­but time is no longer any object with me.  Amelie has a donkey and a little cart to drive me to the station at Couilly when I take that line, or when I want to do an errand or go to the laundress, or merely to amuse myself.

If you can really match this for a cheap, easy, simple way for an elderly person to live in dignity, I wish you would.  It is far easier than living in Paris was, and living in Paris was easier for me than the States.  I am sorry, but it is the truth.

You ask me what I do with the “long days.”  My dear! they are short, and yet I am out of bed a little after four every morning.  To be sure I get into bed again at half past eight, or, at latest, nine, every night.  Of course the weather is simply lovely.  As soon as I have made sure that my beloved panorama has not disappeared in the night I dress in great haste.  My morning toilette consists of a long black studio apron such as the French children wear to school,—­it takes the place of a dress,—­felt shoes inside my sabots, a big hat, and long gardening-gloves.  In that get-up I weed a little, rake up my paths, examine my fruit trees, and, at intervals, lean on my rake in a Maud Muller posture and gaze at the view.  It is never the same two hours of the day, and I never weary of looking at it.

My garden would make you chortle with glee.  You will have to take it by degrees, as I do.  I have a sort of bowing acquaintance with it myself—­en masse, so to speak.  I hardly know a thing in it by name.  I have wall fruit on the south side and an orchard of plum, pear, and cherry trees on the north side.  The east side is half lawn and half disorderly flower beds.  I am going to let the tangle in the orchard grow at its own sweet will—­that is, I am going to as far as Amelie allows me.  I never admire some trailing, flowering thing there that, while I am admiring it, Amelie does not come out and pull it out of the ground, declaring it une salete and sure to poison the whole place if allowed to grow.  Yet some of these same saletes are so pretty and grow so easily that I am tempted not to care.  One of these trials of my life is what I am learning to know as liserone—­we used to call it wild morning-glory.  That I am forbidden to have—­if I want anything else.  But it is pretty.

I remember years ago to have heard Ysolet, in a lecture at the Sorbonne, state that the “struggle for life” among the plants was fiercer and more tragic than that among human beings.  It was mere words to me then.  In the short three weeks that I have been out here in my hilltop garden I have learned to know how true that was.  Sometimes I am tempted to have a garden of weeds.  I suppose my neighbors would object if I let them all go to seed and sow these sins of agriculture all over the tidy farms about me.