onger because I loved it. I wish I knew the way
to the land where the days that have passed live; for when those that
are to come seem cold to me, I would like to go and pay the old ones a
visit. How well I would know their faces, and how glad I would be to see
them again in their own world!

Well, perhaps, even though I can never find the way there, I can see the
days' portraits painted in rows in the picture gallery of a house I own.
It isn't a very big house yet, but at least one new room is being built
onto it every year, and lately it has grown faster than ever before,
though the architecture has improved. Fancy my being a householder! But
I am, and so is everybody. We all have the House of our Past, of which
we alone have a key, and whenever we wish, we can steal softly, secretly
in, by dim passages, to enter rooms sealed to the whole world except
ourselves.

I have been making the picture gallery in mine, since I left America;
but the pictures I care for most have been put up since I began
motoring.

I suppose some very rich natures can be rich without travel, for they
are born with caskets already full of jewels; but ordinary folk have
empty caskets if they keep them shut up always in one safe, and I begin
to see that mine were but poor things. I keep them wide open now, and
every day, every hour, a beautiful new pearl or diamond drops in.

It seems strange to remember how reluctant I was to come away. I thought
there could be nothing more beautiful, more satisfying to eyes and
heart, than my home. The white, colonial house set back from the broad
Hudson River among locust trees and tall, rustling maples; the sloping
lawn, with the beds of geranium and verbena; the garden with its dear,
old-fashioned flowers--holly-hocks, sweet-williams, bleeding-hearts,
grass pinks, and yellow roses; the grey-green hills across the water;
that picture stood to me for all that was ideal on earth. And then, the
Sisters, with their soft ways and soft voices, their white robes and
pale blue, floating veils; how their gracious figures blended with and
accentuated the peaceful charm of the scene, shut away from the storms
of this world throughout their lives!

I was partly right, for of its kind there could be nothing more
beautiful than that picture, but my mistake was in the narrow-minded
wish to let one suffice. I rejoice now in every new one I have hung up,
and shall rejoice all the more when I am back again myself--just one