A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



does not hit you in the back of the neck una 

 wares, gives a certain voluptuous spontaneity to 

 idleness. No dress-coat to put on in the even 

 ing ; no hypocritical letters to be answered ; no 

 flowers to be bought ; no new restaurant in some 

 ^dirty street to be put up with ; no tiresome hostess 

 to listen to ; no weary sense of being on parade. 

 Freedom to go barefooted if I felt like it, and eat 

 with my knife if the impulse took me. Safe from 

 that demoniac cry of &quot; Ah there &quot; ; never startled 

 by a &quot; Halloo.&quot; All the social bandages gone, 

 and with them most of the lies that they engender. 

 One day I walked over with Griselle to see the 

 Hotchkiss &quot; Folly &quot; a great tumble-down man 

 sion, whose projector had ruined himself, and was 

 now out of sight and out of mind somewhere under 

 his old apple trees. What he had laid out as a 

 prospective park had reverted, in the inevitable 

 course of Nature, to a bedraggled farm. The 

 other practical Hotckisses had foreclosed, and 

 the latest Hotchkiss, crawling out like a spider 

 from some web where he was biding his time, 

 had taken possession, and was now making it pay 

 the taxes and keep him. An atmosphere of van 

 ished hopes mingled with its wild spilth. Great 

 big colonial rooms, weedy porches, rotted and 

 twisted by wistaria that had screwed itself into all 

 the chinks and made them gap. A grandmother 

 in one end of it, close to the summer kitchen, 

 and the big oven that had been closed up for 

 years, but had smoke stains still around its mouth, 

 telling how it had once flamed and roared. The 



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