down the road. I live in dread of the time when the city shall reach one of its long arms out here. It hasn't yet; there is Mrs. Bassett's tiny little cottage with the poplars whispering at its windows, but beyond that no winter neighbors; in the summer, when the trees spread their green tents, there are so many—if one sees them!
"It is very quiet here," Ethelwyn remarked thoughtfully.
It couldn't have happened better, and I seized the advantage without a moment's delay. I impressed upon her young mind that it was quiet here—that it had been the arduous labor of a large portion of my lifetime to make it so, and that at last people understood and respected my eccentricities. For nine months of the year guests were welcome to all that I could give, but for the other three, from the middle of March to the middle of June, I was at home only to the hills.
"I hope you won't mind, Ethelwyn," I finished. "I gave you fair warning, you know."
Ethelwyn drew a long sigh of bliss.
"Oh Cousin Persis," she cried, "I think that's just the sweetest thing! I adore quiet. And there isn't any at home, you know. Somehow or other people are always coming—they never will understand that I like to be alone. I don't know what it is—maybe it's the air—or the mosquitoes. Yes, I think that's it—the mosquitoes! They make people restless. It's so much more endurable to get up and go somewhere than to sit still and let them devour you wholesale! And you have no mosquitoes here, you say? And no callers? Oh Cousin Persis, it's the loveliest place I ever heard of in my life—it's—it's just the Forest of Arden—that's what 'tis. I'm going to date all my letters from the Forest of Arden."
I looked at her firmly.
"If I remember rightly, Ethelwyn, things happened in the Forest of Arden, and"
She interrupted me a trifle hastily. "But this," she said, "shall be a forest where nothing happens!—only birds, you know, and hills and sunsets and things like that. Oh, nothing else at all forever and ever!"
It is three weeks since Ethelwyn came. I have to acknowledge that things have not happened exactly as I planned, but Ethelwyn has so clearly pointed out to me that it is not her fault at all—that, indeed, she seems to be the innocent victim of some persistent fate, that any haunting suspicions that I may have always merge into sympathetic commiseration. It was the night after our talk that Mr. Hawkins called. He was a neighbor up in Medway, and happening to be in Washington, felt in duty bound to call in order to report to Cousin Tom. I could but acknowledge the entire reasonableness of this when Ethel-
