ON A PORCH 



nearer to understanding her and even to admiring 

 her during the few hours I spent with her on the 

 porch of the Hotchkiss &quot; Folly.&quot; The nymph 

 passed into the woman during those lazy summer 

 hours when she was not flitting before my eyes, 

 but was in sober repose, listening to me. I trace 

 it all back to that old porch, and therefore I shall 

 have to tell you about it: It was the common 

 kind, twelve feet wide, fifty feet long, roofed and 

 shingled. Viewed from above, it was difficult to 

 tell where the house ended and the porch began. 

 An old-fashioned balustrade ran along its outer 

 edge, with here and there a broken baluster and 

 a sagging hand-rail. There were wide steps, 

 slightly concave with the tread of generations. 

 They descended to a grass-grown road, and at 

 their two sides there were rank bunches of phlox 

 and nasturtiums, dissolutely intertwined, with 

 spears of timothy sticking out of the tangle. 

 There, too, sprang the Virginia creeper and the 

 wild-grape vine that climbed the pillars and fes 

 tooned the spaces between, making, as Gabe 

 Hotchkiss said, &quot; a pooty bad job when we come 

 to paint the house.&quot; But we never came to paint 

 it; you could see that by the fantastic streaks 

 the broken leaders made. Late in the summer 

 the morning-glories still distribute their trumpets 

 all through the vines, and the wrens quarrel there 

 as of old, I dare say. Sometimes a humming 

 bird vibrates above one of the blooms, and so 

 impalpable is he that you might take him to be 

 the spirit of the flower trying to disentangle him- 



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