A Cottage on the Wissahickon Hills 
View from the Lane 
The Old White House Across the Way 
242 
will hold the great oaks that stand black 
against the sunset reds and golds more 
beautiful than ever they were in the leafy 
fleece of spring, the lush green of summer or 
in autumn’s red-brown. These I think are 
the walks homeward that I love best, for 
home never seems so much home as on eves 
of hard black frost when I hurry along the 
snow-plough furrow right into the heart of 
the dazzling west. Yet when the earth rolls 
nearer the sun and there come evenings when 
long lines of blackbirds clack across gold- 
green sunset skies, when the hylas in the 
swamp near the station and the weeping wil¬ 
low by my home tell me spring is near, I 
wonder is winter better than this! And so I 
wonder of May eves when I can almost feel 
myself laved in the apple-scent from the 
trees in the orchard 
by the laneside as 
I pass. Oh, but it 
is hard to tell what 
time of year the 
country life is best! 
The little house 
has but eight 
rooms. I say eight, 
for, although two 
of them are so 
small you may 
hardly turn round 
in them, and al¬ 
though you are 
sure to bump your 
head until long 
acquaintance has 
made you wary, 
the two narrow halls added to the two little 
hall-rooms fustify me in putting the total at 
eight. These halls, the kitchen at the end 
of the lower, the hall-room at the end of the 
upper, and the hall-room that shares the third 
storey with a large low-ceilinged old chamber 
were added when the house was enlarged 
twenty years ago. Then it passed from a 
farmhouse of five rooms into a city-folk’s 
summer residence of eight. 
Your length from the front door, common¬ 
place modern pine stairs lead to the second 
storey, but turn into the room at your left and 
you are back in the Germantown of the early 
nineteenth century. Although built only sixty 
years ago, the house was fashioned after an 
older style. As out of doors you are miles 
away from Suburbia, only a mile distant, and 
as the simple yard 
and the prospect 
from it cause a 
hundred years to 
fall from Time, so 
it is here indoors. 
The walls, bare of 
paper, are washed 
ivory-white, where 
a century ago 
would have been 
the blue-white of 
whitewas h; the 
furniture is ma¬ 
hogany, in style 
of that period 
from Chippendale 
to Sheraton, some 
of it from that old 
The Snow-bound Lane 
