HOMES NEAR TO NATURE 



453 



response to an inherent call to get away 

 from artificialities and convention — to 

 be where one could live one's daily life 

 and act upon one's individual impulses 

 without taking into consultation (so to 

 speak) two or three million neighbors. 

 Cities, doubtless, are rational and 

 logical things from many points of 

 view, and to the greater percentage of 

 urban dwellers the cry ot nature would 

 awaken no responsive call. They are 

 covered over and surrounded and per- 

 meated with such a depth and breadth 

 and weight of tradition, like so many 

 ships at the bottom of the sea, that any 



the subject to the surface and away 

 from the entombment. Other individ- 

 uals, like ocean's flotsam and jetsam, 

 are simply spued up by the city sea. 

 To which class of the rescued we belong 

 it is hard to say; for we don't seem to 

 remember the time when the message 

 of nature came unheeded to our ears, 

 or when the longing for country life 

 did not exist. 



And we wanted no suburban life — in 

 the sense in which that term is gener- 

 ally employed. As we look at it, the 

 suburban town or residence parks are 

 neither flesh, fish, fowl, nor good red her- 



THE VERY ATTRACTIVE DINING ROOM. 



influence from the outside fails to reach 

 them, fails to affect them any more 

 than the wind and storm-waves dis- 

 turb the wrecks cradled on the ocean's 

 floor. Occasionally, to an individual 

 among benighted city dwellers comes a 

 voice or a written word, like a diver to 

 an isolated treasure-hulk, which sets in 

 motion influences that eventually carry 



ring. We wanted something "truly ru- 

 ral ;" and so we picked out a spot not only 

 rural, but absolutely bucolic — where 

 there was neither railroad nor trolley 

 line, where there was not much likeli- 

 hood that any would ever be and 

 where, in any direction, it was more 

 than two leagues to a railroad station. 

 And here we built, much of it with our 



