, have loved. We kept on seeing the old town to
our left, across a harbour as full of white yachts and sailboats as a
New England pond is of water lilies. Jack was loving everything, and
utterly oblivious that beyond Salem lay Aunt Mary-ville. His face was
perfectly ecstatic as we crossed a river--Whittier's beloved
Merrimac--on an ancient covered wooden bridge. He said the sound of the
tires on the slightly loose boards was better music than the followers
of Richard Strauss could make from the "noises of life." I do love those
covered bridges, don't you? They're so richly brown, some of them, that
while one slowly travels along under the roof, it's like looking at the
sun through a piece of cider-brown glass. Or if they're not brown,
they're a soft, velvet gray--gray as shadows at full moon, gray as the
light in dreams.

I hardly know how, eventually, we did get into old Marblehead, for Jack
and I were both so infatuated with the way we lost sight now and then of
the goal. Imagine a road lined on either side with apple trees. If you
haven't seen these, you have never seen such orchards in your life, my
Mercedes! If there was anything as good in Eden, no wonder Eve ate that
apple. I shouldn't wonder if she fixed her eye on it when it was still a
bud.

And then, behind the orchards, there were hills, playgrounds for baby
cedars. Everything contrived to look at least two hundred years old
(except the blossoms and the motor cars), and even the pigeons had such
an air of colonial serenity that they simply refused to stir for a
new-fangled thing like an automobile. They sat still, pretending not to
see us, and never changed their expressions!

At last we did get into old Marblehead, and I'm so happy to tell you it
was exactly like finding our way round the corner in a picture. You know
that thrilling corner in pictures, leading somewhere you are dying to
see and never can? Well, now I have seen it. It's Marblehead. Round the
corner of the front of the picture where the new, smart things are, we
cleverly slipped in. And there was the background running up the canvas,
all over funny labyrinths of streets generally leading nowhere, or, if
anywhere, back to the same garden we'd just passed, a darling garden
boiling over with grass pinks, cabbage roses, sweet williams, and
bleeding hearts. Each house was just a little quainter than the other,
and Jack and I thought we were going to like Marblehead better than any
that ever liv