I had already marked that house as the finest (to my taste) in
Wainwright, though hitherto, on my excursions to this metropolis, the
state capital, I was not without a certain native jealousy that
Spencerville, the county-seat where I lived, had nothing so good. Now,
however, I approached its purlieus with a pleasure in it quite
unalloyed, for I was at last myself a resident (albeit of only one day's
standing) of Wainwright, and the house--though I had not even an idea
who lived there--part of my possessions as a citizen. Moreover, I might
enjoy the warmer pride of a next-door-neighbor, for Mrs. Apperthwaite's,
where I had taken a room, was just beyond.

This was the quietest part of Wainwright; business stopped short of it,
and the "fashionable residence section" had overleaped this "forgotten
backwater," leaving it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look about
it which is the quality of few urban quarters, and eventually of none,
as a town grows to be a city--the look of still being a neighborhood.
This friendliness of appearance was largely the emanation of the homely
and beautiful house which so greatly pleased my fancy.

It might be difficult to say why I thought it the "finest" house in
Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was
merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain,
set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a
fair spread of flat lawn. But it gave back a great deal for your glance,
just as some people do. It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked
not like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in
it. Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your
horse and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old-fashioned people
living there, who would welcome you merrily.