of house on the ground floor, without even one window, convenient to
retire to during severe thunder storms or to evade a personal interview
with a burglar; just the place, too, for a restless ghost to revisit.

Best of all, every room was blessed with two closets.

Outside, what rare attractions! Twenty-five acres of arable land,
stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed,
hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with
plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of starting a poultry
farm.

The situation, too, was exceptional, since the station from which I
could take trains direct to Boston and New York almost touched the
northern corner of the farm, and nothing makes one so willing to stay
in a secluded spot as the certainty that he or she can leave it at any
time and plunge directly into the excitements and pleasures which only a
large city gives.

What charmed me most of all was a tiny but fascinating lakelet in the
pasture near the house; a "spring-hole" it was called by the natives,
but a lakelet it was to me, full of the most entrancing possibilities.
It could be easily enlarged at once, and by putting a wind-mill on the
hill, by the deep pool in "Chicken Brook" where the pickerel loved to
sport, and damming something, somewhere, I could create or evolve a
miniature pond, transplant water lilies, pink and white, set willow
shoots around the well-turfed, graveled edge, with roots of the
forget-me-not hiding under the banks their blue blossoms; just the
flower for happy lovers to gather as they lingered in their rambles to
feed my trout. And there should be an arbor, vine-clad and sheltered