of
stunted wood and scrub-oaks, where I could be perfectly undisturbed. If
the farmer's family with whom I was to board, were noisy or intrusive,
one could take one's writing materials and go--well, somewhere--into the
woods, perhaps. I was only twenty-two, and I was sanguine.

I saw a cloud of white dust down the road--nothing more, but the
station-agent, with a certainty born of long experience, shouted
encouragingly: "Thar she comes!" and presently I found myself in a
large, sombre and warm conveyance, very like the wagon known to the New
York populace familiarly, if not fondly, as "the Black Maria."

The driver was a tow-headed lad of sixteen, so consumed with blushes
that, out of pity, I refrained from questions, and sat silently enduring
the heat behind the black curtains, while we traversed, it seemed to me,
miles of dusty, white road, bordered by ugly, flat fields, or dwarf
woods and undergrowth, before we stopped at a smart white farm-house.
The farmer's wife, hearing our approach, stood on the little porch to
welcome me. Mrs. Hopper gave a peculiar glance at my begrimed person and
face, and I followed her up the narrow stairs with an odd, homesick
sinking of the heart, seized by a momentary pang of that "nostalgia of
the pavement," felt oftener by the poor than rich dwellers of the city,
in exile. Perhaps I loved New York in an inverse ratio to what I had
suffered in it. All the miseries of hope deferred, unremitting labor,
and unnumbered petty cares attendant upon a straightened income, were
forgotten, and I yearned for its ugly, midsummer glare, even its
unsavory odors, and my stifling little chamber "_au troisieme_" as I
surveyed the tiny bare room, with its blue and gray "cottage set," its
white-washed walls, hung with a solitary engraving of Lincoln and his
Cabinet. It was not a beautiful spot, truly, yet I thought dubiously, as
I drank in the silence, it might be a very good place in which to bring
to an end the sufferings of my heroine, who had agonized through several
hundred pages of manuscript.

"I expect you're tired," said Mrs. Hopper, sitting down carefully on the
edge of the feather-bed to which I was condemned. "It's a pretty quiet
place here--ain't much of a village, but then you said you wanted a
quiet place to write in. I guess you'll be s'prised--there's another
orther here. Maybe you know him, his name's Longworth, John Longworth?
Don't! Why, he lives to New York! No, he ain't right here