Robin Hood's Barn 



an earlier fancy, no signs of an allegiance which 

 I might find it wise to overlook. The closets, 

 too, were guiltless of all subterfuge, the comers 

 of evasion. Search as I might, I could not find 

 the shadow of a past. The place was almost too 

 immaculate, too young for its year. It seemed 

 absurd to have nothing more to show. Why I, at 

 two and twenty was scarce older, and yet at a 

 pinch, I had more that I might find it provocative 

 to confess. However, it had a simplicity to which 

 I had not then attained. It dared to state its 

 poverty, a poverty so neat, so bare, so stripped 

 of all save fundamentals that the room seemed 

 like the cabin of a ship in dry-dock before her 

 maiden trip. And as though it were lying snug 

 in harbor, the port-holes held httle landscapes 

 of bright color. The arch and sweep of elms, 

 elders breaking into foam above an old gray wall, 

 a stream seen only where it caught the light in 

 filtering through the sedge; and rolling back 

 from this deep trough of marshland, pastures that 

 broke into green crest against a western sky. 



As I stood confronted by this brightness, im- 

 mediate and inescapable, I felt a strange reversal 



[64] 



