class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="7"/> I could find the extra time–“without interfering with my academic duties”–to be a reader for a certain publishing house which had just consulted him about filling a vacancy. I told him frankly that if I got the job I might give up my present post and buy a farm, but as he didn’t think anybody could live on a manuscript reader’s salary, he laughed and didn’t believe me, and two days later I had the job. It would be a secret to disclose my salary, but to a man who had been an English instructor in an American college for seven years, it looked good enough. Then came the Easter vacation.

Professor Farnsworth, of the economics department, had invited me on a motor trip for the holidays. (The professor married a rich widow.)

“As the Cheshire cat said to Alice,” he explained, “it doesn’t matter which way you go, if you don’t much care where you are going to; and we don’t, do we?”

“Yes,” I said, “I want to look at farms.”

But he only laughed, too. “Anyhow, we won’t look at a single undergraduate,” he said.

In the course of our motor flight from the Eternal Undergraduate, we reached one night a certain elm-hung New England village noted for its views and its palatial summer estates, and put up at the hotel there. The professor, whose hobby is real estate values, fell into a discussion with the suave landlord on the subject, considered locally. (Being a state congressman, he was unable to consider anything except locally!) The landlord, to our astonishment, informed us that building-sites on the village street and the nearby hills sold as high as $5,000 per acre.

“What does farm land cost?” I inquired sadly.

“As much as the farmer can induce you to pay,” he laughed. “But if you were a farmer, you might get it for $100 an acre.”

“I am a farmer,” said I. “Where is there a farm for sale?”

The landlord looked at me dubiously. But he volunteered this information: “When you leave in the morning, take the back road, up the hollow, toward what we call Slab City. You’ll pass a couple of big estates. About half a mile beyond the second estate, you’ll come to a crossroad. Turn up that a hundred yards or so and ask for Milt Noble at the first house you come to. Maybe he’ll sell.”

It was a glorious April morning when we awoke. The roads were dry. Spring was in the air. The grass had begun to show green on the beautiful lawns of Bentford Main Street. The great elms drooped their slender, bare limbs like cathedral arches. We purred softly up the Slab City road, pleased by the name of it, passed the two estates on the hill outside of the village, and then dipped into a hollow. As this hollow held no extended prospect, the summer estates had ceased on its brim. The road became the narrow dirt track of tradition, bramble-lined. Presently we reached the crossroad. A groggy sign-board stood in the little delta of grass and weeds so characteristic of old New England crossroads, and on it a clumsy hand pointed to “Albany.” As Albany was half a day’s run in a motor car, and no intervening towns were mentioned, there was a fine, roving spirit about this groggy old sign which tickled me.

We ran up the road a hundred yards of the fifty miles to Albany, crossed a little brook, and stopped the motor at what I instantly knew for my abode.

I cannot tell you how I knew it. One doesn’t reason about such things any more than one reasons about falling in love. At least, I’m sure I didn’t, nor could I set out in cold blood to seek a residence, calculating water supply, quality of neighbours, fashionableness of site, nearness to railroad, number of closets, and all the rest. I saw the place, and knew it for mine–that’s all.

As the motor stopped, I took a long look to left and right, sighed, and said to the professor: “I hereby resign my position as instructor in English, to take effect immediately.”

The professor laughed. He didn’t yet believe I meant it.

My grandfather was an Essex County farmer, and lived in a rectangular, simple, lovely old house, with woodsheds rambling indefinitely out behind and a big barn across the road, with a hollow-log watering trough by a pump in front and a picture of green fields framed by the little door at the far end. Grandfather’s house and grandfather’s barn, visited every summer, were the sweetest recollections of my childhood. And here they were again–somewhat dilapidated, to be sure, with a mountain in the barn-door vista instead of the pleasant fields of Essex–but still true to the old Yankee type, with the same old wooden pump by the hollow-log trough, green with moss.

I jumped from the motor and started toward the house on the run.

“Whoa!” cried the professor, laughing, “you poor young idiot!” Then, in a lower tone, he cautioned: “If our friend Milt sees you want this place so badly, he’ll run up the price. Where’s your Yankee blood?”

I sobered down to a walk, and together we slipped behind a century-old lilac bush at the corner of the house, and sought the front of the dwelling unobserved. The house was set with its side to the road, about one hundred feet into the lot. A long ell ran out behind, evidently containing the kitchen and then the sheds and outhouses. The side door, on a grape-shadowed porch, was in this ell, facing the barn across the way. The main body of the dwelling was the traditional, simple block, with a fine old doorway, composed of simple Doric pilasters supporting a hand-hewn broken pediment–now, alas! broken in more than an architectural sense. It was a typical house of the splendid carpenter-and-builder period of a century ago.

This front door faced into an aged and now sadly dilapidated orchard. Once there had been a path to the road, but this was now overgrown, and the doorsteps had rotted away. The orchard ran down a slope of perhaps half an acre to the ferny tangle of the brook bed. Beyond that was a bordering line of ash-leaf maples, evidently marking the other road out of which we had turned. The winters had racked the poor old orchard, and great limbs lay on the ground. What remained were bristling with suckers. The sills of the house were still hidden under banks of leaves, held in place by boards, to keep out the winter cold. There were no curtains in the windows, nor much sign of furniture within. From this view the old house looked abandoned. It had evidently not been painted for twenty years.

But, as I stood before the battered doorway and looked down through the storm-racked orchard to the brook, I had a sudden vision of pink trees abloom above a lawn, and through them the shimmer of a garden pool and the gleam of a marble bench or, maybe, a wooden bench painted white. On the whole, that would be more in keeping. This Thing called gardening had got hold of me already! I was planning for next year!

“You could make a terrace out here, instead of a veranda,” I was saying to the professor. “White wicker furniture on the grass before this Colonial doorway! It’s ideal!”

He smiled. “How about the plumbing?” he inquired.

I waved away such matters, and we returned around the giant lilac tree to the side door, searching for Milton Noble. A bent old lady peered over her spectacles at us, and allowed Milt wuz out tew the barn. He was, standing in the door contemplating our car.

“Good morning,” said I.

“Mornin’,” said he, peering sharply at me with gray eyes that twinkled palely above a great tangle of white whisker.

“A fine old house you have,” I continued.

“Hed first-growth timber when ’twas built. Why wouldn’t it be?” He spat lazily, and wiped the back