basking in the sun.  Just one huge sheet of water, broken by islands, lies between us and the cherry blossoms of Japan!  There is a thrill about its very emptiness, and yet since I have seen the Golden Gate I know that that thrill is nothing to the sensation of seeing a sailing ship with her canvas spread, bound for the far East.  From the West to the East the spell draws.  First from the East to the West; from the cold and storms of New England to our land of sun it beckons, and then unless we hold tight, the lure of the South Seas and the glamour of the Far East calls us.  I know just how it would be.  Perhaps my spirit craves adventuring the more for the years my body has had to spend in a chaise longue or hammock, fighting my way out of a shadow.  Anyway, I have heard the call, but I have put cotton in my ears and am content that life allows me three months out of the twelve of magic and my hill-top.

There is a town, of course—­there has to be, else where would we post our letters.  It’s as busy as a beehive with its clubs and model playgrounds, its New Thought and its “Journal,” but I don’t have to be of it.  There are only so many hours in the day.  I go around “in circles” all winter; in summer I wish to invite my soul, and there isn’t time for both.  I think I am regarded by the people in the village as a mixture of recluse and curmudgeon, but who cares if they can live on a hill?

One flaw there was in the picture, and that is where the first experiment in wheedling came in.  A large telegraph pole on our property line bisected the horizon like one of the parallels on a map.  It seemed to us at times to assume the proportions of the Washington Monument.  I firmly made up my mind to have it down if I did nothing else that summer, and I succeeded, though I began in July and it was not till October that it finally fell crushing into the sage brush, and for the first time we saw the uninterrupted curve of beach melting into the pale greenish cliffs beyond.

The property on which the pole stood belonged to a real-estate man.  He was pleasant and full of rosy dreams of a suburban villa resort, the gem of the Pacific Coast.  That part was easy.  He and I together visited the offices of the corporations owning the wires on that pole.  As they had no legal right of way they had to promise to remove it and many others, to the tune of several hundred dollars.  Nothing was left them but the game of delay.  They told me their men were busy, that all the copper wire was held up by a landslide in the Panama Canal, that the superintendent was on a vacation, etc.  However, the latter gentleman had to come back some time, and when he did I plaintively told him my troubles.  I said I had had a very hard and disappointing summer, and that it would soothe me enormously to have one look at that view as the Lord intended it to be, before I had to go away for the winter, that it was in his power to give me that pleasure, etc.