Branford,
where Yale College was founded, and where there are the very nicest
seventeenth century houses you ever saw--_fighting_ houses with
overhanging upper stories where you could look down through holes in the
floor and pot at Indians trying to break in; Guilford, prettiest of all
the villages on Jack's list of places where he'd like to live (we almost
envied Fitz Greene Halleck, the poet, for being born there); Clinton,
with its parklike common which reminded us of the Lichtenthal Allee at
Baden-Baden; old Saybrook, worthy of its name, and thrilling for its
antique shops; old Lyme, the haunt of artists, glimmering white in a
grove of elms; Flanders village--East Lyme--where all the flowers on
earth were jumbled sweetly together like happy families in every garden.
But if I did delay you thus, your poor mind would become like one of
these jumbled gardens, full of sweet things impossible to sort. Mine is
like that already; but, after all, it doesn't matter so much for me,
because Jack has promised to bring me this way once again before we go
back home. Then, if I've mixed one village with another in a kind of
mental earthquake, I can rearrange my _tout ensemble_. Impressions of
the country, however, I shall never lose or blur disastrously with those
of any other part: it is too individual, and makes too clear a picture.

Much of our way was like a private park bigger than any king or emperor
in Europe ever owned. Then, after miles of trees with blue, misty vistas
hanging between, like painted gauze curtains, we flashed suddenly out to
open spaces purple-red with fireweed, and vast, flat stretches of tawny
marshland swept with tides of colour, rainbow streaks of amethyst and
rose-topaz. The Sound was within sight and smell. Salt perfume of ocean
mingled with spicy fragrance from the sunburnt bayberry flung in thick
ruglike masses upon bare gray rock, and azure veinings of the sea, stray
among the marshes, made strong-growing water plants give out a tang that
was tonic to our nostrils.

You may think that such a picture could be sketched in colour along the
coastline of almost any country, but if so, you will be mistaken, for
all this as we saw it was extraordinarily individual and _American_.
Why, exactly, I can't define, but you will understand, if Monty
doesn't. Though you say you haven't been much in New England you know
what the soul of America is. Well, this soul, whose first (remembered)
spark came from the I