id="id00190">I had come to a place now, I thought, trying to quell the sense of loneliness that oppressed me, as I looked around at the expanse of stunted wood and scrub-oaks, where I could be perfectly undisturbed. If the farmer's family with whom I was to board, were noisy or intrusive, one could take one's writing materials and go—well, somewhere—into the woods, perhaps. I was only twenty-two, and I was sanguine.

I saw a cloud of white dust down the road—nothing more, but the station-agent, with a certainty born of long experience, shouted encouragingly: "Thar she comes!" and presently I found myself in a large, sombre and warm conveyance, very like the wagon known to the New York populace familiarly, if not fondly, as "the Black Maria."

The driver was a tow-headed lad of sixteen, so consumed with blushes that, out of pity, I refrained from questions, and sat silently enduring the heat behind the black curtains, while we traversed, it seemed to me, miles of dusty, white road, bordered by ugly, flat fields, or dwarf woods and undergrowth, before we stopped at a smart white farm-house. The farmer's wife, hearing our approach, stood on the little porch to welcome me. Mrs. Hopper gave a peculiar glance at my begrimed person and face, and I followed her up the narrow stairs with an odd, homesick sinking of the heart, seized by a momentary pang of that "nostalgia of the pavement," felt oftener by the poor than rich dwellers of the city, in exile. Perhaps I loved New York in an inverse ratio to what I had suffered in it. All the miseries of hope deferred, unremitting labor, and unnumbered petty cares attendant upon a straightened income, were forgotten, and I yearned for its ugly, midsummer glare, even its unsavory odors, and my stifling little chamber "au troisième" as I surveyed the tiny bare room, with its blue and gray "cottage set," its white-washed walls, hung with a solitary engraving of Lincoln and his Cabinet. It was not a beautiful spot, truly, yet I thought dubiously, as I drank in the silence, it might be a very good place in which to bring to an end the sufferings of my heroine, who had agonized through several hundred pages of manuscript.

"I expect you're tired," said Mrs. Hopper, sitting down carefully on the edge of the feather-bed to which I was condemned. "It's a pretty quiet place here—ain't much of a village, but then you said you wanted a quiet place to write in. I guess you'll be s'prised—there's another orther here. Maybe you know him, his name's Longworth, John Longworth? Don't! Why, he lives to New York! No, he ain't right here in the house, he's across the street to the Bangses', but you'll see him," she said, encouragingly. "It'll be awful pleasant for you two orthers to get acquainted. The Bangses don't keep cows, an' every night at milkin' time, over he comes to get a glass o' warm milk; guess he likes to talk to our men-folks. Old Bangs ain't much comp'ny for anybody, let alone a writer. He's got a man with him to wait on him; a kind o' nurse, I b'lieve. He was near dead before he came here, though he looks pretty smart now—had a fever. Some of the folks here hev got it around he was out of his head, a man so, a-settin' around out o' doors, writin' from mornin' till night. Lord, how mad it made the Bangses!" Mrs. Hopper indulged in an abrupt retrospective laugh of enjoyment. "They was so set up, havin' a writer there, an' Mary Bangs was pretty well taken down when I told her we was a-goin' to have one here. She acted as if she didn't b'lieve there was more'n one orther to New York, an' that was Mr. Longworth," continued Mrs. Hopper, regarding me with a proprietor's pride, as I removed my hat and hung it on a nail driven in the wall. I smiled as I reflected that I, too, should doubtless be looked on with suspicion as a fit subject for a straight-jacket, if I, an able-bodied young woman, should sit "out o' doors" with my writing, while my presumable betters were working.

"Well, I guess I'll go down now," said Mrs. Hopper, after a brief pause, in which she examined my gown. "I expect you want y'r dinner. We live a good piece from the store, Miss Marriott an' any time if you should get out of ink, don't make any bones of asking for it. We've got some right here in the house, an' you're as welcome to it as if you was my own daughter."

I was glad to find, at dinner, that the family consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Hopper only, with the exception of a couple of farm-hands, whose lumbering tread down the back-stairs wakened me each morning about four. I found Mr. Hopper a tall, bent old man, with meek, faded blue eyes, and a snowy frill of beard. He had an especially sweet and pathetic voice, with a little quaver in it, like a bashful girl's.

He laid down his knife and fork, and looked at me with an air of gentle inquiry, as I took my seat at the table. "Mrs. Hopper tells me you're a literary," he said at length. I'm afraid I replied, "Yes?" with the rising inflection of the village belle, nothing else occurring to me to say.

"Well," said Mr. Hopper, softly, pushing back his chair, and rising to leave the table, "it's in our fam'ly some too. And in Ma's. One o' my uncles and one o' her brothers." He shuffled out of the room with a placid smile, as Mrs. Hopper said, deprecatingly, but with conscious pride, "La, pa, Jim never wrote more'n two or three pieces."

For a few days I took a vacation. I wandered about the "back lots," down to the mill-dam, up and down the lonely, winding street where all the prim houses—and they were very far apart—wore a desolate, closed look, as though the inhabitants were away, or dead. I grew accustomed to my environments; the little bedroom began to seem like home to me. On my way to the post-office some one passed me on the sandy, yellow patch, a man clothed after the manner of civilization, whose garments, cut by no country tailor, were not covered by overalls. I knew it must be "the other orther." None of the males in Wauchittic appeared in public, except on Sunday, save in overalls. It would have been, I think, considered unseemly, if not indecent.

The man was young, with a worn, delicate face, marked by ill-health, and though I had studiously avoided the yard near "milkin' time," in spite of Mrs. Hopper's transparent insistance each evening on my going out to see the brindled heifer, I think my indifferent glance was assumed, for though John Longworth, so far as I knew, had not his name inscribed on the records of fame, and was probably a penny-a-liner on a third-rate newspaper, I had the instinct of fellow-craft, that is, alas! strongest in the unknown and ardent young writer. He walked feebly, and his brilliant eyes were haggard and circled, as though by long illness. I saw him drive by nearly every afternoon, accompanied by his nurse, a good-humored young fellow, who helped him tenderly into the carriage, and drove, while he lay back with the irritated expression that the sense of enforced idleness and invalidism gives a man in the heyday of youth. Mrs. Hopper, who was loquacious to a degree, told me long stories of his parents' wealth, of the luxuries brought down with him, and of the beautiful pieces of furniture he had had sent down for his room, for his physician had recommended him to an absolutely quiet place for the entire summer. She burned with an irrepressible desire to have me make the acquaintance of this son of wealth and literature, either from the feminine proclivity for match-making, or because, possibly, she thought, having an intense reverence for writers, that our conversation would be of an edifying and uncommon character. I fear she was disappointed, for on the occasion of our first meeting,—I believe Mr. Longworth came to see Mrs. Hopper on some trifling business, and I happened to be writing on the front porch,—our remarks were certainly of the most commonplace type, and I saw a shade of disappointment steal across her face, as she stood by triumphantly,