which
I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us
were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses;
across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never
could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were
really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of
ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we
calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we
called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we
might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We
even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so
lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were
not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty
we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole,
though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets
of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; and
with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were
infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so
gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.

I.

It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by
European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in
Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose
to keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every one
had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives
without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life
there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the
capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted
for less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but
one private carriage (naturally, a publisher's); and there was not one
livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike,
who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his
carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge. We
thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of
amazing depth and thickness.

The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young
literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of
un