n't fall in love with it, and its
proprietor, Whit Walker. Promise you'll let me be the first one to
introduce you to both?"

I promised, and wanted to be prepared for what I must expect to find;
but Mr. Brett would tell me nothing. He said that neither the great
Whit Walker nor Hermann's Corners Emporium could possibly be described
for the comprehension of a foreigner.

We were in a sweet and gracious country now. It looked as if Mother
Nature would never allow any of her children who obeyed her, to be poor
or unhappy here. As we whizzed along the up and down road between
billowing meadows of grain, we could see here and there a farm house
showing between trees, or peering over the brow of a rounded hill; but
there was none where I longed to stop until we came in sight of a dear,
old, red-brick house--_really_ old, not what some Americans call old.
It was set back several hundred yards from the road, and an avenue of
magnificent maples--each one a great green temple--led up to the
comfortable, rose-draped porch which sheltered the door. There was an
old-fashioned garden on one side, with a running flame of hollyhocks
hemming it in; the background was a dark green oak and maple grove; and
in a clover meadow beyond the garden was a colony of beehives. It
looked an ideal, storybook place, and I wished it might be the Valley
Farm, but thought such a thing too good to be true. When one is going
to stop at a house one has never seen, as Vic says, it usually turns
out to be the one of all others you like least.

So I was delighted when we turned in at the open gate with its guardian
apple tree on either side. We sailed up the avenue under the maples,
but instead of making for the front entrance, turned off into a farm
road which led round the side of the house, and the tooting of our horn
brought three women smiling and waving to a door under a long, narrow
verandah before we stopped.

One was a tall, thin, middle-aged woman, with grey-brown hair pulled
away from her forehead and done in a knob at the back of her head. Her
skin was sunburned; she wore a black and white print frock, without so
much as a ruffle or tuck, and her sleeves were rolled up over her
sun-browned arms above the elbow; she had no real pretensions to being
pretty, and yet, somehow, she was one of the nicest-looking women I
ever saw. She had the sort of expression in her eyes, and in her smile,
you would like your mother to have, if you could have had