After our guests had departed, to college or school or home, the house was left almost deserted.  We did not shut it up, however.  Fires were bright on all hearths, and lamps were kept burning.  We did not mean to lose the cheeriness of the house, though much of the family had departed.  For a wonder, the days did not seem lonesome.  After the fist break was over, we did not find time to think of our solitude, and as the weeks passed we wondered what new wings had caused them to fly so swiftly.  Each day had its interests of work or study or social function.  Stormy days and unbroken evenings were given to reading.  We consumed many books, both old and new, and we were not forgotten by our friends.  The dull days of winter did not drag; indeed, they were accepted with real pleasure.  Our lives had hitherto been too much filled with the hurry and bustle inseparable from the fashionable existence-struggle of a large city to permit us to settle down with quiet nerves to the real happiness of home.  So much of enjoyment accompanies and depends upon tranquillity of mind, that we are apt to miss half of it in the turmoil of work-strife and social-strife that fill the best years of most men and women.

It is a pity that all overwrought people cannot have a chance to relax their nerves, and to learn the possibilities of happiness that are within them.  Most of the jars and bickerings of domestic life, most of the mental and moral obliquities, depend upon threadbare nerves, either inherited or uncovered by friction incident to getting on in the world.  I never understood the comforts that follow in the wake of a quiet, unambitious life, until such a life was forced upon me.  When you discover these comforts for the first time, you marvel that you have foregone them so long, and are fain to recommend them to all the world.

Polly and I had gotten on reasonably well up to this time; but before we became conscious of any change, we found ourselves drawn closer together by a multitude of small interests common to both.  After twenty-five years of married life it will compensate any man to take a little time from business and worry that he may become acquainted with his wife.  A few fortunate men do this early in life, and they draw compound interest on the investment; but most of us feel the cares of life so keenly that we take them home with us to show in our faces and to sit at our tables and to blight the growth of that cheerful intercourse which perpetuates love and cements friendship in the home as well as in the world.

There were no serious cares nowadays, and time passed so smoothly at Four Oaks that we wondered at the picnic life that had fallen to us.  The village of Exeter was alive in all things social.  The city families who had farms or country places near the village were so fond of them that they rarely closed them for more than two or three months, and these months were as likely to come in summer as in winter.