hour's ride by railway. But the nearest railway station (Heaven be
praised!) is two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw.
Ponkapog has one mail a day; two mails a day would render the place
uninhabitable.

The village--it looks like a compact village at a distance, but unravels
and disappears the moment you drive into it--has quite a large floating
population. I do not allude to the perch and pickerel in Ponkapog Pond.
Along the Old Bay Road, a highway even in the Colonial days, there are a
number of attractive villas and cottages straggling off toward Milton,
which are occupied for the summer by people from the city. These birds
of passage are a distinct class from the permanent inhabitants, and the
two seldom closely assimilate unless there has been some previous
connection. It seemed to me that our new neighbors were to come under
the head of permanent inhabitants; they had built their own house, and
had the air of intending to live in it all the year round.

"Are you not going to call on them?" I asked my wife one morning.

"When they call on _us_," she replied lightly.

"But it is our place to call first, they being strangers."

This was said as seriously as the circumstance demanded; but my wife
turned it off with a laugh, and I said no more, always trusting to her
intuitions in these matters.

She was right. She would not have been received, and a cool "Not at
home" would have been a bitter social pill to us if we had gone out of
our way to be courteous.