hich Nature has lavished all her prodigality in
tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble bluffs three hundred feet high,
their sharp ridges as exquisitely definite as the edge of a shell; their
summits adorned with those same beautiful trees and with buttresses of
rich rock, crested with old hemlocks that wear a touching and antique
grace amid the softer and more luxuriant vegetation."

Not spectacular, this--not sensational--not even unusual. Common enough
little hills, as the world goes, with the usual ragged-edged village
between them and the river, peopled by human beings entirely usual both
in their outer and inner lives. It seems to be, indeed, not a place in
which events could occur with any romantic fitness.

Perhaps I have grown to love this Little Country because I am a usual
man. Perhaps I would have felt as much for it even had I not been held
to it by a memory that would bind me to any spot howsoever unlovely. But
I rejoiced always in its beauty, and more than ever when it made easier
for me the only life it once appeared that I should live. I quote again
from our visiting poet: "The aspect of this country was to me enchanting
beyond any I have ever seen, from its fulness of expression, its bold
and impassioned sweetness. Here the flood has passed over and marked
everywhere its course by a smile. The fragments of rock touch it with a
mildness and liberality which give just the needed relief. I should
never be tired here, though I have elsewhere seen country of more secret
and alluring charms, better calculated to stimulate and suggest. Here
the eye and heart are filled."

Here, too, my eye and heart were filled--emptied--and wondrously filled
yet again, for which last I hold Potts to be curiously--but I wander.

Enough to say that I stored a harvest of memories in a secret place here
years ago. And I went to this on days when I was downhearted. Your boy
of fifteen, I think, is the only perfect lover--giving all, demanding
nothing, save, indeed, the right to his secret cherishings.

Tremors, born within me that day when old gray, bristling Leggett, our
Principal, opened the schoolroom door upon Lucy Tait, are as poignant,
as sweetly terrible, now as in that far time when the light of her
wondrous presence first fell upon me.

An instant she hesitated timidly in the sombre frame of the doorway,
looking far over our heads. Then old Leggett came in front of her. There
was a word of presentation to Miss Berh