HUIRY-SUR-MARNE

June 3, 1914.

and

I DID not decide to come away into a little corner in the country, in the land in which I was not born, without looking at the move from all angles. Be sure that I know what I am doing, and I have found the place where I can do it. Some day you will see the new home, I hope, and then you will understand. I have lived more than sixty years. I have lived a fairly active life, and it has been, with all its hardships, they have been many, - interesting. But I have had enough of the city, — even of Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. Nothing can take any of that away from me. It is treasured up in my memory. But I have come to feel the need of calm and quiet — perfect peace. I know again that there is a sort of arrogance in expecting it; but I am going to make a bold bid for it. I will agree, if you like, that it is cowardly to say that my work is done. I will even agree that we both know plenty of women who have cheerfully gone on struggling to a far greater age, and I do think it downright pretty of you to find me younger than my years. Yet you must forgive me if I say that no one can decide for another the

1 These are authentic letters of an American

proper moment for striking one's colors.

I am sure that you never heard of Huiry. Yet it is a little hamlet, less than thirty miles from Paris, in that district between Paris and Meaux which is little known to the ordinary traveler. It consists of less than a dozen rude farmhouses, less than five miles, as a bird flies, from Meaux, — which, with a fair cathedral, and a beautiful chestnut-shaded promenade on the banks of the Marne, spanned just there by lines of old mills whose water-wheels churn the river into foaming eddies, has never been popular with excursionists. Some people go there to see where Bossuet wrote his funeral orations, in a little summer-house on the wall of the garden of the Archbishop's palace; now, since the 'separation,' the property of the State, and soon to be a town museum. It is not a very attractive town: it has not even an out-of-doors restaurant to tempt the passing automobilist.

My house was, when I leased it, little more than a peasant's hut. It is considerably over one hundred and fifty years old, with stables and outbuildings attached whimsically, and boasts six gables. Is it not a pity, for early associations' sake, that it has not one more? I have, as Traddles used to say, 'Oceans of room, Copperfield,' and no

VOL. 116-NO. 1

the main building a fair-sized salon, into which the front door opens directly. Over that I have a long narrow bedroom and dressing-room, and above that, in the eaves, a sort of attic workshop. In an attached one-story.addis tion, with a gable, at the west of the salon, I have a library lighted from both east and west: Behind the salon on the west, side I have à double room which serves as dining- and breakfast-rooms, with a guest-chamber above. The kitchen, at the north side of the salon, has its own gable, and there is an old stable extending forward at the north side, and an old grange extending west from the dining-room. It is a jumble of roofs and chimneys, like the houses I used to combine from my Noah's Ark box in the days of my babyhood.

But much as I like all this, it was not this that attracted me here, but the situation. The house stands in a small garden, separated from the road by an old gnarled hedge of hazel. It is almost on the crest of the hill on the south bank of the Marne, the hill that is the watershed between the Marne and the Grand Morin. Just here the Marne makes a wonderful loop, and is only fifteen minutes' walk away from my gate, down the hill to the north.

From the lawn, on the north side of the house, I command a panorama which I have rarely seen equaled. To me it is more beautiful than that which we have so often looked at together from the terrace at St. Germain. In the west the new part of Esbly climbs the hill; and from there to a hill at the northeast I have a wide view of the valley of the Marne, backed by a low line of hills which is the watershed between the Marne and the Aisne. Low down in the valley, at the northwest, lies Île de Villenoy, like a toy town, where the big bridge spans the Marne to carry the railroad into Meaux. On the horizon line to the west the tall chimneys of

Claye send lines of smoke into the air. In the foreground to the north, just at the foot of the hill, are the roofs of two little hamlets, - Joncheroy and Voisins, and beyond them the trees that border the canal. On the other side of the Marne the undulating hill, with its wide stretch of fields, is dotted with little villages that peep out of the trees or are silhouetted on the sky-line. On clear days I can see the square tower of the cathedral at Meaux, and I have only to walk a short distance on the route nationale (which runs from Paris, across the top of my hill a little to the east, thence to Meaux and on to the frontier), to get a profile view of it standing above the town, quite detached, from foundation to clock-tower.

This is a rolling country of grainfields, orchards, masses of black-currant bushes, and vegetable plots. It is what the French call 'une paysage riante,' and I assure you it does more than smile these lovely June mornings. I am up every morning almost as soon as the sun, and I slip my feet into sabots, wrap myself in a big cloak, and run right on to the lawn to make sure that the panorama has not disappeared in the night. There it always lies too good, almost, to be true: miles and miles of laughing country; little white towns just smiling in the early light; a thin strip of river here and there, dimpling and dancing; stretches of fields of all colors, all so peaceful and so gay and so 'chummy,' that it gladdens the opening day, and makes me rejoice to have lived to see it. I never weary of it. It changes every hour, and I never can decide at which hour it is the loveliest. After all, it is a rather nice world.

I used to think, and I continued to think for a long time, that I could not live if my feet did not press a city pavement. The fact that I have changed my mind seems to me, at my age, a sufficient excuse for, as frankly, changing