THE RANDALL FAMILY 93
seven or eight successive years, we spent several weeks together in the summer-time at Stow, mostly alone with each other, talking, reading, walking and driving about the country for many miles in all directions. Stow itself was an insignificant and out-of-the-way farming town of about a thousand inhabitants, with a small cotton factory in the village of Rockbottom, a mile or so distant from the Randall place. The entire region was beautifully rural, and we left scarcely a single country road unexplored throughout the neighboring towns of Berlin, Bolton, Lan- caster, Boylston, Marlborough, Sterling, Harvard, Acton, Littleton, Concord, Sudbury, Framingham, Boxborough, and so forth. The house (in later years changed almost beyond recognition) was a square two-story dwelling, with a long ell of many rooms in the rear for the farmer's family, and with a long verandah on three sides of the main building. On this verandah we took our exercise in rainy weather, walk- ing up and down for hours at a time in animated conversa- tion. There was a charming and airy library room, built by Mr. Randall himself as a one-story addition, in which we spent much of our time indoors, and near which grew on a mound of its own the tree which prompted his poem "To a Snow-covered Apple-tree."
Life at Stow was delightfully Bohemian. We rose when we pleased, had our meals when we pleased, and did exactly what we pleased. Our long drives of twenty or thirty miles often brought us back late in the evening, when we took our supper, and afterwards talked or read far into the small hours of the morning. There were no neighbors except the honest (or dishonest) farmers of the town in their widely scattered farm-houses. Randall in- dulged in no illusions as to the superior virtuousness of country life as such, and was full of amusing stories as to
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