k to bring up the rear of
the procession after Salem, letting even the lumbering Hippopotamus
bumble on ahead) we beheld all our family of cars drawn up under some
skyscraping elms, in front of the most delectable tea-house you ever met
in your life. The Hippo was in front of a very fine old white church,
with "I am one of the pillars of New England" written in every line of
it; but it was certainly the tea-house which had arrested its career.

[Illustration: map]*

There was a large green and white striped umbrella or two protecting
some little tables, and grouped round those little tables were our
friends.

"I'm _hanged_ if we'll be having tea with my Aunt Mary!" said I, with
that firm-jawed look Jack has got to know and fear as characteristic of
the American wife at bay.

So we had tea there, under elms so generously deep and thick that large
populations of robins live in them without ever having seen each other's
faces. They were, to the tree world, what Blenheim is in castle world.
People can come and live there for years, they say, without the duke
ever knowing they've arrived. Well, so could whole families of birds
live in these elms without the leading robin hearing an alien chirp.

We drowned our sorrows in tea and cream, and buried our sinister
premonitions in scones. Also cakes. A wonderful woman had made them--a
lady-woman. She will be the heroine of my great American novel, if I
ever write one. I hope to goodness she won't be gone from Wenham before
it's finished and I can send her a presentation copy! Everything was
green and white in the tea-house, except the dear little things to be
sold there: weather-cocks, and door-stops, and old china. We bought
specimens of these as sops to Cerberus--I mean, as presents for Aunt
Mary--and when there was no longer a pretext for lingering we crept
reluctantly away with the spoils.

It was absolutely _no_ comfort to me, as we crawled through the pretty
square, and approached "Miss Keddison's mansion" (only too easy to find)
that Wenham would be a lovely place to spend not only one but many
nights in. There, on a colonial porch, behind colonial pillars, in a
colonial rocking-chair, sat Aunt Mary on the watch. _She_ looked not
only colonial but Doric!

We had got ahead of the others by this time, and my aunt, rising from
her chair, with a gesture stopped the whole procession. I don't know
whether she meant to do this or not, but no one would have dared pass,
any