Margaret ran over to
my wife, bringing in her hand a slip of paper.

"See that!" she cried, her eyes dancing with pleasure. It was a check for
a thousand dollars. "That will refurnish the mission from top to bottom,"
she said, "and run it for a year."

"How generous he is!" cried my wife. Margaret did not reply, but she
looked at the check, and there were tears in her eyes.

XV

The Arbuser cottage at Lenox was really a magnificent villa. Richardson
had built it. At a distance it had the appearance of a mediaeval
structure, with its low doorways, picturesque gables, and steep roofs,
and in its situation on a gentle swell of green turf backed by native
forest-trees it imparted to the landscape an ancestral tone which is much
valued in these days. But near to, it was seen to be mediaevalism adapted
to the sunny hospitality of our summer climate, with generous verandas
and projecting balconies shaded by gay awnings, and within spacious, open
to the breezes, and from its broad windows offering views of lawns and
flower-beds and ornamental trees, of a great sweep of pastures and
forests and miniature lakes, with graceful and reposeful hills on the
horizon.

It was, in short, the modern idea of country simplicity. The passion for
country life, which has been in decadence for nearly half a century, has
again become the fashion. Nature, which, left to itself, is a little
ragged, not to say monotonous and tiresome, is discovered to be a
valuable ally for aid in passing the time when art is able to make
portions of it exclusive. What the Arbusers wanted was a simple home in
the country, and in obtaining it they were indulging a sentiment of
returning to the primitive life of their father, who had come to the city
from a hill farm, and had been too busy all his life to recur to the
tastes of his boyhood. At least that was the theory of his daughters; but
the old gentleman had a horror of his early life, and could scarcely be
dragged away from the city even in the summer. He would no doubt have
been astonished at the lofty and substantial stone stables, the long
range of greenhouses, and at a farm which produced nothing except lawns
and flower-beds, ornamental fields of clover, avenues of trees,
lawn-tennis grounds, and a few Alderneys tethered to feed among the
trees, where their beauty would heighten the rural and domestic aspect of
the scene. The Arbusers liked to come to this place as early as possible
to escape th