ON A PORCH 



of domestic life from stress and peril to peace and 

 prosperity. When the big porch came in, the 

 block-house and the stockade went out. De 

 fiance gave way to invitation. Always to the 

 far-away country home, the porch is a gracious 

 neutral ground between the exclusiveness of the 

 home and the impertinence of the world why 

 not say, enchanted ground, and be done with it, 

 for really that old porch at the Hotchkiss house 

 had its unsubstantial enchantment. A rarefied 

 atmosphere hung over it. The odour of it comes 

 back to me with vague associations as I write this. 

 It had a flavour of its own, distilled, one might 

 say, by time, as we have it in old wine. The 

 spruce shingles and flooring had absorbed a dis 

 tinctive bouquet from the years as if the sun had 

 baked them to a memorial ripeness. It was 

 faintly balsamic and evasive, as in the odour of 

 sweet clover, that you cannot trace like a fact, but 

 must accept like a presence. 



One does not need to be either a sensualist or 

 a sentimentalist to be wholesomely affected by the 

 inanimate serenities. I should dislike very much 

 to be thought incapable of separating an odour from 

 an orison, or an aesthetic thrill from an aspiration, 

 and yet the atmosphere of the old porch, of which 

 I was scarcely conscious at the time, must have 

 been making its deposit while I was thinking of 

 other things. Mine has not been a luxurious nor 

 an idle life. It is well marked by the scars of 

 endeavour, and there are in it such ordinary 

 triumphs as come to all ordinary men. But on 



