st carefully preserved Early Victorian, who will
not confess to having passed a happy childhood with the Little Women of
Miss Alcott. _Helen's Babies_ was the first and by far the best book in
the modern scriptures of baby-worship. And about all this old-fashioned
American literature there was an undefinable savour that satisfied, and
even fed, our growing minds. Perhaps it was the smell of growing things;
but I am far from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood. Now
that all the memory comes back to me, it seems to come back heavy in a
hundred forms with the fragrance and the touch of timber. There was the
perpetual reference to the wood-pile, the perpetual background of the
woods. There was something crude and clean about everything; something
fresh and strange about those far-off houses, to which I could not then
have put a name. Indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness of
wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even in fantasy. I
will not go so far as to say that it shortened the transition from Log
Cabin to White House; as if the White House were itself made of white
wood (as Oliver Wendell Holmes said), 'that cuts like cheese, but lasts
like iron for things like these.' But I will say that the experience
illuminates some other lines by Holmes himself:--

Little I ask, my wants are few,
I only ask a hut of stone.

I should not have known, in England, that he was already asking for a
good deal even in asking for that. In the presence of this wooden world
the very combination of words seems almost a contradiction, like a hut
of marble, or a hovel of gold.

It was therefore with an almost infantile pleasure that I looked at all
this promising expansion of fresh-cut timber and thought of the housing
shortage at home. I know not by what incongruous movement of the mind
there swept across me, at the same moment, the thought of things
ancestral and hoary with the light of ancient dawns. The last war
brought back body-armour; the next war may bring back bows and arrows.
And I suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in London; and a model
of Shakespeare's town.

It is possible indeed that such Elizabethan memories may receive a check
or a chill when the traveller comes, as he sometimes does, to the
outskirts of one of these strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and is
confronted with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, 'Watch Us
Grow.' He can always imagine that he see