roup who "want to have their cake and eat it too." That is, we really
wanted a place in the country but we wanted it near enough so that the
desk of the very necessary and important job could be reached without
too much effort. Also the idea of an occasional evening in town was
not to be dismissed lightly.

Such humdrum items as railroad time tables were consulted. Having
decided that the ideal location would be one in which the time
required for train trip and motoring from house to station would come
within an hour, we limited our search to that section just beyond the
suburban fringe in Connecticut and Westchester County, New York. We
had no clear idea of the type of house we wanted, save that it be old
and of good lines. We looked with and without the aid of real estate
dealers. We deluged our friends already living in the country with
queries.

We found a disheartening number of fine old houses, located just
wrong. There was a splendid, two-story brick house with hall running
through the middle. But it stood in the commercial section of a
village, its door steps flush with the sidewalk, and was hemmed in on
one side by a gas station. There was a neat little story-and-a-half
stone house with picket fence, old-fashioned rose bushes, and
beautiful shade trees. It had once been the parsonage of the
neighboring church. Unhappily the old churchyard lay between.

Now, we are not people who whistle determinedly when passing a marble
orchard at midnight nor do we see white luminous shapes flitting among
the tombstones. But daily gazing upon one's final resting place, we
felt might, in time, prove depressing. Besides, we were by no means
certain that our friends had developed the callous indifference of a
young couple we heard of years later. Curiously free of inhibitions,
these two people bought an attractive old farmhouse with a family
burying lot located a fair distance from the house. The little plot
with its eight or ten simple headstones was unobtrusive and rather
gave an air of family roots deep in the soil, a quality all too rare
in America. These young vandals could not let well enough alone. They
uprooted the headstones and laid them end to end for a walk to their
front door! They were considering the plot itself as a possible tennis
court when outraged public opinion forced them to put the stones back.
In fact, the general hostility was so marked that they finally
abandoned the place and it was later sold at a