It wasn’t just an ordinary farm.  There was a certain something—­I think the names of the goats had a lot to do with it—­Corella, Coila, Babette, Elfa, Viva, Lorine, and so on, or perhaps it was the devotion of their mistress, who expended the love and care of a very large heart on a family that I think appreciated it as far as goats are capable of appreciation.  If she was a little late coming home (she had a tiny shack on one corner of the place) they would be waiting at the gate calling plaintively.  There is a plaintive tone about everything a goat has to say.  In his cot on the porch J——­ composed some verses one morning early—­I forget them except for two lines: 

    “The plaintive note of a querulous goat
     Over my senses seems to float.”

Of course that was the difficulty—­creatures of one kind or another do not lie abed late.  Our Sabine Farm was surrounded by others and there was a neighborhood hymn to the dawn that it took us some time to really enjoy—­if we ever did.  Sopranos—­roosters; altos—­pigeons, and ducks; tenors—­goats; bassos—­cows, and one donkey.  There was nothing missing to make a full, rich volume of sound.  Of course there is no place where it is so difficult to get a long, refreshing night’s sleep as the country.

One rarely comes through any new experience with all one’s preconceived ideas intact.  Our first season on the Sabine Farm shattered a number of mine.  I had always supposed that a mocking-bird, like a garden, was “a lovesome thing, God wot.”  Romantic—­just one step below a nightingale!

There was a thicket of bamboos close to my window, and every night all the young mocking-birds gathered there to try out their voices.  It was partly elocutionary and partly vocal, but almost entirely exercises—­rarely did they favor me with a real song.  This would go on for some time, then just as I dared to hope that lessons were over, another burst of ill-assorted trills and shrills would rouse me to fury.  I kept three pairs of boots in a convenient place, and hurled them into the bamboos, paying the boys a small reward for retrieving them each morning.  Sometimes, if my aim was good, a kind of wondering silence lasted long enough for me to fall asleep.  There is an old song—­we all know it—­that runs: 

    “She’s sleeping in the valley, etc., etc.,
     And the mocking-bird is singing where she lies.”

That, of course, would be impossible if the poor little thing hadn’t been dead.

By day I really enjoyed them.  To sit in the garden, which smelled like a perpetual wedding, reading Lafcadio Hearn and listening to mocking-birds and linnets, would have undermined my New England upbringing very quickly, had I had time to indulge often in such a lotus-eating existence.