The right, the eternal, will triumph o’er wrong.
Whatever is true, friends, will live, yes, forever,
So now we will stop—and discuss the weather.
We had written in the guest book, “Every day is the best day of the year,” adding “This is surely true of July 6, 1906.” The parting lines were read to us as we sat in the carriage, and we had driven out of sight of the corner piazza when we heard a good-by call from the cousin who came in late the night before from his round of professional visits, feeling quite ill. He looked so much better we wondered if the “Michigan subscriber” had been sending wireless messages to her “materia medica” cousin.
The visiting part of our journey was now over, and we started anew, with no more reason for going to one place than another. We had spent so much time on the preliminary “loop” in Rhode Island and Connecticut that we could not go as far north in the Adirondacks as we want to some time, but a drive home through the White Mountains is always interesting. How to get there was the problem, when the Green Mountains were between. You can drive up and down New Hampshire and Vermont at will, but when you want to go across, the difficulties exceed those of the roads east and west in Rhode Island and Connecticut. We knew the lovely way from Benson to Bread Loaf Inn in Ripton, then over the mountains, and along the gulf roads to Montpelier, but we inclined to try a new route. You drive through the White Mountains but over the Green Mountains.
With a new route in mind, from Benson we drove over more and higher hills to Brandon Inn for the night. The Inn is very attractive, but remembering the warm welcome from our many friends, the inscription over the dining-room fire-place hardly appealed to us:
“Whoe’er has traveled this dull world’s round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he yet has found
His warmest welcome at an inn.”