The farmer's wife, hearing our approach, stood on the little porch to
welcome me. Mrs. Hopper gave a peculiar glance at my begrimed person and
face, and I followed her up the narrow stairs with an odd, homesick
sinking of the heart, seized by a momentary pang of that "nostalgia of
the pavement," felt oftener by the poor than rich dwellers of the city,
in exile. Perhaps I loved New York in an inverse ratio to what I had
suffered in it. All the miseries of hope deferred, unremitting labor,
and unnumbered petty cares attendant upon a straightened income, were
forgotten, and I yearned for its ugly, midsummer glare, even its
unsavory odors, and my stifling little chamber "_au troisième_" as I
surveyed the tiny bare room, with its blue and gray "cottage set," its
white-washed walls, hung with a solitary engraving of Lincoln and his
Cabinet. It was not a beautiful spot, truly, yet I thought dubiously, as
I drank in the silence, it might be a very good place in which to bring
to an end the sufferings of my heroine, who had agonized through several
hundred pages of manuscript.

"I expect you're tired," said Mrs. Hopper, sitting down carefully on the
edge of the feather-bed to which I was condemned. "It's a pretty quiet
place here--ain't much of a village, but then you said you wanted a
quiet place to write in. I guess you'll be s'prised--there's another
orther here. Maybe you know him, his name's Longworth, John Longworth?
Don't! Why, he lives to New York! No, he ain't right here in the house,
he's across the street to the Bangses', but you'll see him," she said,
encouragingly. "It'll be awful pleasant for you two orthers to get
acquainted. The Bangses don't keep cows, an' every night at milkin'
time, over he comes to get a glass o' warm milk; guess he likes to talk
to our men-folks. Old Bangs ain't much comp'ny for anybody, let alone a
writer. He's got a man with him to wait on him; a kind o' nurse, I
b'lieve. He was near dead before he came here, though he looks pretty