_concrete_ way. I realized the beauty, the
individual charm, the historic interest, but now I'm beginning to put
them together in a bouquet where one flower sets off another. Oh, dear,
I wish that not _quite_ so many things had happened before our day! It
would have been easier to sort them about a hundred and fifty years ago.
Yet, a hundred and fifty years ago there wouldn't have been an Emerson,
a Thoreau, a Hawthorne, a Longfellow, a Whittier, a Bryant, a Lowell, or
an Oliver Wendell Holmes, to say nothing of half a dozen others I'm too
excited to recall at the moment. It would have been sad to come here
before they lived and embroidered the tapestry of life with their lovely
thoughts--almost the difference between travelling on a gray day and in
clear sunshine. For New England belongs to these philosophers and poets
just as much as it belongs to the Indians and Puritans and Soldiers of
the Revolution.

Now you see what my mood is! I think Jack has inspired it, for he can
quote most of the New England writers, if not by the yard at least by
the _inch_. He says he used to learn their wit and wisdom to repeat "at
his mother's knee." I shouldn't have supposed Lady Brightelmston's knee
capable of it; but one never knows!

The last time I wrote you was at New London. I posted the letter at
Groton, I remember, because I was thinking so hard of "The Peter Storm
Mystery" that everything else went out of my head. My dear, _he stayed
behind_, with his Russian friend, leaving Pat to the mercy of Caspian!

You have to cross by ferry to get to Groton--old Fort Griswold--and the
New London side is _too_ amusing. Practically all the boy population of
America seemed to be there to see us off. They had come on purpose to
tell motorists what to do and whither to proceed, thus extracting dimes
in gratitude or blackmail. Good gracious! If we tried to do half the
things they advised, nay, insisted on, we'd be as busy as bees the rest
of our lives or else go mad! I can tell you we were thankful to escape
on to the charming, peaceful road we found after the ferry had shed us
on the other side. Soon we turned off on to a rough short cut; but it
was fascinating, too, and would have been like scenery on the Crinan
Canal if it hadn't been still more like itself. The hydrangeas growing
in the gardens were marvellous, great trees of them, with different
shaped flowers from ordinary human hydrangeas, flowers like huge bunches
of white grapes se