more prosaic reaches that were furnished chiefly in the light green of
deciduous trees; it was part of a long stretch thickly set for miles with
the dark and sombre green of pines. Our nature-lover had taken, the year
before, a neglected and dilapidated old farmhouse and had made it into what
her friends and habitues liked to call a bungalow. The house had been put
up--in the rustic spirit which ignores all considerations of landscape and
outlook--behind a well-treed dune which allowed but the merest glimpse of
the lake; however, a walk of six or eight minutes led down to the beach,
and in the late afternoon the sun came with grand effect across the gilded
water and through the tall pine-trunks which bordered the zig-zag path.
Medora had added a sleeping porch, a dining-porch and a lean-to for the
car; and she entertained there through the summer lavishly, even if
intermittently and casually.

"No place in the world like it!" she would declare enthusiastically to the
yet inexperienced and therefore the still unconverted. "The spring arrives
weeks ahead of our spring in town, and the fall lingers on for weeks after.
Come to our shore, where the fauna and flora of the whole country meet in
one. All the wild birds pass in their migrations; and the flowers!" Then
she would expatiate on the trailing arbutus in April, and the vast sheets
of pale blue lupines in early June, and the yellow, sunlike blossoms of the
prickly-pear in July, and the red glories of painter's-brush and
bittersweet and sumach in September. "No wonder," she would say, "that they
have to distribute handbills on the excursion-trains asking people to leave
the flowers alone!"

"How shocking!" Cope had cried, with his resonant laugh, when this phase of
the situation was brought to his attention. "Are the automobile people any
better?"