What you are pleased to call my "pride" has helped me a little. No one
can decide for another the proper moment for striking one's colors.

I am sure that you--or for that matter any other American--never heard
of Huiry. Yet it is a little hamlet less than thirty miles from Paris.
It is in that district between Paris and Meaux little known to the
ordinary traveler. It only consists of less than a dozen rude
farm-houses, less than five miles, as a bird flies, from Meaux, which,
with a fair cathedral, and a beautiful chestnut-shaded promenade on the
banks of the Marne, spanned just there bylines of old mills whose
water-wheels churn the river into foaming eddies, has never been popular
with excursionists. There are people who go there to see where Bossuet
wrote his funeral orations, in a little summer-house standing among
pines and cedars on the wall of the garden of the Archbishop's palace,
now, since the "separation," the property of the State, and soon to be a
town museum. It is not a very attractive town. It has not even an
out-of-doors restaurant to tempt the passing automobilist.

My house was, when I leased it, little more than a peasant's hut. It is
considerably over one hundred and fifty years old, with stables and
outbuildings attached whimsically, and boasts six gables. Is it not a
pity, for early association's sake, that it has not one more?

I have, as Traddles used to say, "Oceans of room, Copperfield," and no
joking. I have on the ground floor of the main building a fair sized
salon, into which the front door opens directly. Over that I have a
long, narrow bed-room and dressing-room, and above that, in the eaves, a
sort of attic work-shop. In an attached, one-story addition with a
gable, at the west of the salon, I have a library lighted from both east