HOME AND GARDEN 



CHAPTER I 



HOW THE HOUSE WAS BUILT 



Does it often happen to people who have been in a 

 new house only a year and a half, to feel as if they had 

 never lived anywhere else ? How it may be with 

 others I know not, but my own little new-built house 

 is so restful, so satisfying, so kindly sympathetic, that 

 so it seems to me. 



In some ways it is not exactly a now house, 

 although no building ever before stood upon its site. 

 But I had been thinking about it for so many years, 

 and the main block of it and the whole sentiment of 

 it were so familiar to my mind's eye, that when it 

 came to be a reality I felt as if I had already been 

 living in it a good long time. And then, from the 

 way it is built it does not stare with newness ; it is 

 not new in any way that is disquieting to the eye ; it 

 is neither raw nor callow. On the contrary, it almost 

 gives the impression of a comfortable maturity of 

 something like a couple of hundred years. And yet 



A 



