roomy old house painted white with green blinds in a town bordering on
Lake Champlain. A pair of horse-chestnut trees flanked the walk to the
front door,--a portal unopened save for weddings, funerals, and the
minister's yearly call.

From here could be seen the sweep of the main range of the Green
Mountains. The kitchen doorway afforded a view of Mount Marcy and the
Adirondacks never to be forgotten. It was the ancestral home with all
the proper attributes, horse barn, woodshed, tool houses, and a large
hay barn. Father's dream for forty years was to recapture it and
settle down to the cultivation of rustic essays instead of its
unyielding clay soil. However, he was first and last a newspaper man
and his practical side told him that Shoreham was too far from
Broadway. So it remained a dream.

His city-born and bred son inherited the insidious idea. Four years in
a country college augmented it and, as time went on, the rumble of
trucks and blare of neighboring radios turned a formerly quiet street
on Brooklyn Heights into a bedlam and brought matters to a head. Great
Aunt Laura's place was still too far away but explorers returning from
ventures into the far reaches of Westchester County, and western
Connecticut, had brought back tales of pleasantly isolated farmhouses
with rolling acres well dotted with trees and stone fences. Here,
thanks to the automobile and commuting trains, was the solution. A
country place near enough to the city, so that the owner could have
his cake and eat it, too.

After some months of searching and several wild goose chases, a modest
little place was found. The original plan was to live there just a few
weeks in the summer, possibly from June into September, but the period