“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