“In one way I am sorry I did not see this place sooner.  I never want to leave it again.  If I had known it was so beautiful I should have vacated the house in town and moved up here permanently.”

I suggested that he could still do so, if he chose, and he entered immediately into the idea.  By and by we turned down a deserted road, grassy and beautiful, that ran along his land.  At one side was a slope facing the west, and dotted with the slender, cypress-like cedars of New England.  He had asked if that were part of his land, and on being told it was he said: 

“I would like Howells to have a house there.  We must try to give that to Howells.”

At the foot of the hill we came to a brook and followed it into a meadow.  I told him that I had often caught fine trout there, and that soon I would bring in some for breakfast.  He answered: 

“Yes, I should like that.  I don’t care to catch them any more myself.  I like them very hot.”

We passed through some woods and came out near my own ancient little house.  He noticed it and said: 

“The man who built that had some memory of Greece in his mind when he put on that little porch with those columns.”

My second daughter, Frances, was coming from a distant school on the evening train, and the carriage was starting just then to bring her.  I suggested that perhaps he would find it pleasant to make the drive.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I should enjoy that.”

So I took the reins, and he picked up little Joy, who came running out just then, and climbed into the back seat.  It was another beautiful evening, and he was in a talkative humor.  Joy pointed out a small turtle in the road, and he said: 

“That is a wild turtle.  Do you think you could teach it arithmetic?”

Joy was uncertain.

“Well,” he went on, “you ought to get an arithmetic—­a little ten-cent arithmetic—­and teach that turtle.”

We passed some swampy woods, rather dim and junglelike.

“Those,” he said, “are elephant woods.”

But Joy answered: 

“They are fairy woods.  The fairies are there, but you can’t see them because they wear magic cloaks.”

He said:  “I wish I had one of those magic cloaks, sometimes.  I had one once, but it is worn out now.”

Joy looked at him reverently, as one who had once been the owner of a piece of fairyland.

It was a sweet drive to and from the village.  There are none too many such evenings in a lifetime.  Colonel Harvey’s little daughter, Dorothy, came up a day or two later, and with my daughter Louise spent the first week with him in the new home.  They were created “Angel-Fishes”—­the first in the new aquarium; that is to say, the billiard-room, where he followed out the idea by hanging a row of colored prints of Bermuda fishes in a sort of frieze around the walls.  Each visiting member was required to select one as her particular patron fish and he