all is silence. I looked out into the moonlight before I closed my
shutters last night. I might have been alone in the world. Yet I like it.

The country is lovely here in winter--so different from what I
remember of it at home. My lawn is still green, so is the corbeille
d'argent in the garden border, which is still full of silvery bunches of
bloom, and will be all winter. The violets are still in bloom. Even the
trees here never get black as they do in New England, for the trunks
and branches are always covered with green moss. That is the
dampness. Of course, we never have the dry invigorating cold that
makes a New England winter so wonderful. I don't say that one is
more beautiful than the other, only that each is different in its charm.
After all, Life, wherever one sees it, is, if one has eyes, a wonderful
pageant, the greatest spectacular melodrama I can imagine. I'm glad
to have seen it. I have not always had an orchestra stall, but what of
that? One ought to see things at several angles and from several
elevations, you know.




VII



December 5, 1914

We have been having some beautiful weather.

Yesterday Amélie and I took advantage of it to make a pilgrimage