Clara Clemens did not come to the place at all.  She was not yet strong, and went to Norfolk, Connecticut, where she could still be in quiet retirement and have her physician’s care.  Miss Hobby came, and on the 21st of May the dictations were resumed.  We began in his bedroom, as before, but the feeling there was depressing—­the absence of the great carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us.  Nothing of the old luxury and richness was there.  It was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness.  At the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, wonderful expanse of scenery.

“I think I shall like it,” he said, “when I get acquainted with it, and get it classified and labeled, and I think we’ll do our dictating out here hereafter.  It ought to be an inspiring place.”

So the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before that panoramic background.  During the earlier, cooler weeks he usually continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now and then to look across the far-lying horizon.  When it stormed we moved into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with blazing logs, and at the other the orchestrelle, which had once more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies.  Sometimes, when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a literal world—­a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the usual way.  When the dictation finished early, there would be music—­the music that he loved most—­Beethoven’s symphonies, or the Schubert impromptu, or the sonata by Chopin.—­[Schubert, Op. 142, No. 2; Chopin, Op. 37, No. 2.]—­It is easy to understand that this carried one a remove farther from the customary things of life.  It was a setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation.  In my notes, made from day to day, I find that I have set down more than once an impression of the curious unreality of the place and its surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere passing fancy.