Often these lovely mornings I take a long walk with the dog before breakfast.  He is an Airedale, and I am terribly proud of him and my neighbors terribly afraid of him.  I am half inclined to believe that he is as afraid of them as they are of him, but I keep that suspicion, for prudential reasons, to myself.  At any rate, all passers keep at a respectful distance from me and him.

Our usual walk is down the hill to the north, toward the shady route that leads by the edge of the canal to Meaux.  We go along the fields, down the long hill until we strike into a footpath which leads through the woods to the road called “Paves du Roi” and on to the canal, from which a walk of five minutes takes us to the Marne.  After we cross the road at the foot of the hill there is not a house, and the country is so pretty—­undulating ground, in every tint of green and yellow.  From the high bridge that crosses the canal the picture is—­well, is French-canally, and you know what that means—­green-banked, tree-shaded, with a towpath bordering the straight line of water, and here and there a row of broad long canal-boats moving slowly through the shadows.

By the time I get back I am ready for breakfast.  You know I never could eat or drink early in the morning.  I have my coffee in the orchard under a big pear tree, and I have the inevitable book propped against the urn.  Needless to say I never read a word.  I simply look at the panorama.  All the same I have to have the book there or I could not eat, just as I can’t go to sleep without books on the bed.

After breakfast I write letters.  Before I know it Amelie appears at the library door to announce that “Madame est servie”—­and the morning is gone.  As I am alone, as a rule I take my lunch in the breakfast-room.  It is on the north side of the house, and is the coolest room in the house at noon.  Besides, it has a window overlooking the plain.  In the afternoon I read and write and mend, and then I take a light supper in the arbor on the east side of the house under a crimson rambler, one of the first ever planted here over thirty years ago.

I must tell you about that crimson rambler.  You know when I hired this house it was only a peasant’s hut.  In front of what is now the kitchen—­it was then a dark hole for fuel—­stood four dilapidated posts, moss-covered and decrepit, over which hung a tangle of something.  It was what I called a “mess.”  I was not as educated as I am now.  I saw—­it was winter—­what looked to me an unsightly tangle of disorder.  I ordered those posts down.  My workmen, who stood in some awe of me,—­I was the first American they had ever seen,—­were slow in obeying.  They did not dispute the order, only they did not execute it.

One day I was very stern.  I said to my head mason, “I have ordered that thing removed half a dozen times.  Be so good as to have those posts taken down before I come out again.”