for the present. Take this and get over the river and out of the
county. The people have been searching for this baby all day, and I
don't know whether they'll listen to my friend and me."

* * * * *

The level red light had left the valleys and low places, and lit alone
the hilltop where the mother was watching, when a great shout came out
of the darkness, spreading from voice to voice through the great expanse
below, and echoed wildly from above, thrilling men's blood and making
hearts stand still; and as it rose and swelled and grew toward her out
of the darkness, the mother knew that her lost child was found.

A LETTER TO TOWN

FERNSEED STATION.
ATLANTIS CO., NEW ----
_February 30, 189-._

MY DEAR MODESTUS:--You write me that circumstances have decided you to
move your household from New York to some inexpensively pleasant town,
village, or hamlet in the immediate neighborhood, and you ask me the
old, old innocent question:

"Shall I like suburban life?"

This question I can answer most frankly and positively:

"No, certainly not. You will not like it at all."

There is no such thing as _liking_ a country life--for I take it that
you mean to remove to the real suburban countryside, and not to one of
those abominable and abhorrent deserts of paved streets laid out at
right angles, and all supplied with sewers and electric light wires and
water-mains before the first lonely house escapes from the house-pattern
books to tempt the city dweller out to that dreary, soulless waste which
has all the modern improvements and not one tree. I take it, I say, that
you are going to no such cheap back-extension of a great city, but that
you are really going among the trees and the water-courses, severing all
ties with the town, save the railway's glittering lines of steel--or,
since I have thought of it, I might as well say the railway ties.

If that is what your intent is, and you carry it out firmly, you are
going to a life which you can never like, but which you may learn to
love.

How should it be possible that you should enjoy taking up a new life,
with new surroundings, new anxieties, new responsibilities, new duties,
new diversions, new social connections--new conditions of every
kind--after living half a lifetime in New York? It is true that, being