HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 117 



they were coming by the hundred. They ar- 

 rived from every nook and corner of the world ; 

 from Cape Town, and Copenhagen; from the 

 Argentine Republic and from Northern Man- 

 churia; from New Zealand and Yucatan; from 

 Egypt and from the Arctic Circle. Within the 

 next three months, when we quit keeping 

 count, we had more than 3,500 of those letters 

 stacked up. Still they came. They're still 

 coming, for that matter, now and then. 



Those thousands of letters were strung upon 

 a single thread of living interest: Was our 

 story fact or fiction? Was it actually possible 

 for a pair of average mortals in this mortal 

 life, without a special dispensation of Provi- 

 dence, to find what we had found, to do what 

 we had done? Would there be a fighting 

 chance that the writers might do for themselves 

 such a thing, having a little money and plenty 

 of courage and strong desire ? They were won- 

 derfully human, those letters ; wonderfully in- 

 timate; rich in revelation of feeling. There 

 wasn't a formal note in the lot; some of them 

 covered close-written pages and pages. It has 

 been a lasting regret that we couldn't answer 

 them all as we wanted to. We tried, spending 



