As I looked absently down the track, I reviewed the past winter months, the long days and evenings spent at my desk in the stuffy little lodgings to which I was limited by my narrow income, interrupted frequently by invasions on various pretexts of the ill-fed chambermaid, who insisted on telling me her woes, or by my neighbor from the next room, the good little spinster, who always knocked to ask if she might heat a flat-iron at my grate when I was in the midst of a bit of minute description.  She would sit down, too, would poor withered Miss Jane, in my little rocking-chair to wait while the iron heated, and she said she often told the landlady she did not know how I could write, I had so many interruptions.

I had come to a place now, I thought, trying to quell the sense of loneliness that oppressed me, as I looked around at the expanse of stunted wood and scrub-oaks, where I could be perfectly undisturbed.  If the farmer’s family with whom I was to board, were noisy or intrusive, one could take one’s writing materials and go—­well, somewhere—­into the woods, perhaps.  I was only twenty-two, and I was sanguine.

I saw a cloud of white dust down the road—­nothing more, but the station-agent, with a certainty born of long experience, shouted encouragingly:  “Thar she comes!” and presently I found myself in a large, sombre and warm conveyance, very like the wagon known to the New York populace familiarly, if not fondly, as “the Black Maria.”

The driver was a tow-headed lad of sixteen, so consumed with blushes that, out of pity, I refrained from questions, and sat silently enduring the heat behind the black curtains, while we traversed, it seemed to me, miles of dusty, white road, bordered by ugly, flat fields, or dwarf woods and undergrowth, before we stopped at a smart white farm-house.  The farmer’s wife, hearing our approach, stood on the little porch to welcome me.  Mrs. Hopper gave a peculiar glance at my begrimed person and face, and I followed her up the narrow stairs with an odd, homesick sinking of the heart, seized by a momentary pang of that “nostalgia of the pavement,” felt oftener by the poor than rich dwellers of the city, in exile.  Perhaps I loved New York in an inverse ratio to what I had suffered in it.  All the miseries of hope deferred, unremitting labor, and unnumbered petty cares attendant upon a straightened income, were forgotten, and I yearned for its ugly, midsummer glare, even its unsavory odors, and my stifling little chamber “au troisieme” as I surveyed the tiny bare room, with its blue and gray “cottage set,” its white-washed walls, hung with a solitary engraving of Lincoln and his Cabinet.  It was not a beautiful spot, truly, yet I thought dubiously, as I drank in the silence, it might be a very good place in which to bring to an end the sufferings of my heroine, who had agonized through several hundred pages of manuscript.