There is usually one serpent in Eden, if it is only a garter snake.  Ours was a frog in the fountain.  He had a volume of sound equal to Edouard de Reske in his prime.  I set the chauffeur the task of catching him, but after emptying out all the water one little half-inch frog skipped off, and John assured me that he could never be the offender.  But he was “Edouard” in spite of appearances, for he returned at dusk and took up the refrain just where he had left off.  I decided to hunt him myself.  It was like the game of “magic music” that we used to play as children:  loud and you are “warm”; soft and you are far away.  I never caught him.  He was ready to greet the tenants instead of the cosy cricket, and may have been the reason why they suddenly departed after only a three weeks’ stay, but as it was a foggy May, as it sometimes is on this coast, that is an open question.  J——­ tersely put it, “Frog or fog?”

The smiling Helen smiled more beamingly every day, but the chauffeur hated it.  He was a city product and looked as much at home on that hill-top as a dancing-master in a hay-field.  He smoked cigarettes and read the sporting page of the paper in the garage, where gasoline rather deadened the country smells of flowers and hay, and tried to forget his degrading surroundings, but he was overjoyed when the day to start for home arrived.  I did not share his feelings, and yet I was ready to go.  It had been a great success, and the only time I had felt lonely was in a crowded restaurant in San Diego, where J——­ and I had had many jolly times in past summers.  On the Smiling Hill-Top who could be lonely with the ever-changing sea and sky and sunsets.  I dare not describe the picture, as I don’t wish to be put down as mad or a cubist.  Scent of the honeysuckle, the flutter of the breeze, the song of pink-breasted linnets and their tiny splashings in the birds’ pool outside my sleeping-porch, the velvet of the sky at night, with its stars and the motor lights on the highway like more stars below—­how I love it all!  I was taking enough of it home with me, I hoped, to last through some strenuous weeks in Pasadena, until I could come back for the summer, bringing my family.

Much bustling about on the part of the smiling Helen and me, much locking of gates and doors by the bored chauffeur, and we were off for home!  After all is said and done, “home is where the heart is,” irrespective of the view.

The first part of the way we made good time, but just out of one of the small seaside towns something vital snapped in the motor’s insides.  It happened on a bridge at the foot of a hill, and we were very lucky to escape an accident.  I will say for the chauffeur that while, as a farmer, he would never get far, as a driver he knew his business.  One slight skid and we stopped short, “never to go again,” like grandfather’s clock.  It resulted in our having to be towed backwards to the nearest garage, while the chauffeur jumped on a