As I looked absently down the track, I reviewed the past winter months,
the long days and evenings spent at my desk in the stuffy little
lodgings to which I was limited by my narrow income, interrupted
frequently by invasions on various pretexts of the ill-fed chambermaid,
who insisted on telling me her woes, or by my neighbor from the next
room, the good little spinster, who always knocked to ask if she might
heat a flat-iron at my grate when I was in the midst of a bit of minute
description. She would sit down, too, would poor withered Miss Jane, in
my little rocking-chair to wait while the iron heated, and she said she
often told the landlady she did not know how I could write, I had so
many interruptions.

I had come to a place now, I thought, trying to quell the sense of
loneliness that oppressed me, as I looked around at the expanse of
stunted wood and scrub-oaks, where I could be perfectly undisturbed. If
the farmer's family with whom I was to board, were noisy or intrusive,
one could take one's writing materials and go--well, somewhere--into the
woods, perhaps. I was only twenty-two, and I was sanguine.

I saw a cloud of white dust down the road--nothing more, but the
station-agent, with a certainty born of long experience, shouted
encouragingly: "Thar she comes!" and presently I found myself in a
large, sombre and warm conveyance, very like the wagon known to the New
York populace familiarly, if not fondly, as "the Black Maria."

The driver was a tow-headed lad of sixteen, so consumed with blushes
that, out of pity, I refrained from questions, and sat silently enduring
the heat behind the black curtains, while we traversed, it seemed to me,
miles of dusty, white road, bordered by ugly, flat fields, or dwarf
woods and undergrowth, before we stopped at a smart white farm-house.