Sometimes alone, but more frequently in the company of friends, we toured Westchester, its main highways and its back roads, its nooks and its corners, until we felt that we knew its topography much better than many born and reared in it. Reason totters on her throne when confronted with the task of trying to remember how many places we looked at—places done, places overdone, places underdone, and places undone. Wherever we went, though, one of two baffling situations invariably arose: If we liked a place the price for that place uniformly would be out of our financial reach. If the price were within our reach the place failed to satisfy our desires.
After weeks of questing about, we did almost close for one estate. It was an estate where a rich man, who made his money in town and spent it in the country, had invested a fortune in apple trees. The trees were there—several thousand of them; but they were all such young trees. It would be several years before they would begin to bear, and meantime the services of a small army of men would be required to care for the orchards and prune them, and spray them, and coddle them, and chase insects away from them. I calculated that if we bought this place it would cost me about seven thousand dollars a year for five years ahead in order to enjoy three weeks of pink-and-white beauty in the blossoming time each spring.
Besides, it occurred to me that by the time the trees did begin to bear plentifully the fashionable folk in New York might quit eating apples; in which case everybody else would undoubtedly follow suit and quit eating them too. Ours is a fickle race, as witness the passing of the vogue for iron dogs on front lawns, and for cut-glass vinegar cruets on the dinner table; and a lot of other things, fashionable once but unfashionable now.
Also, the house stood on a bluff directly overlooking the river, with the tracks of the New York Central in plain view and trains constantly ski-hooting by. At the time of our inspection of the premises, long restless strings of freight cars were backing in and out of sidings not more than a quarter of a mile away. We were prepared, after we had moved to the country, to rise with the skylarks, but we could not see the advantage to be derived from rising with the switch engines. Switch engines are notorious for keeping early hours; or possibly the engineers suffer from insomnia.
At length we decided to buy an undeveloped tract and do our own developing. In pursuance of this altered plan we climbed craggy heights with fine views to be had from their crests, but with no water anywhere near; and we waded through marshy meadows, where there was any amount of water but no views. This was discouraging; but we persevered, and eventually perseverance found its reward. Thanks to some kindly souls who guided us to it, we found what we thought we wanted.
We found a sixty-acre tract on a fine road less than a mile and a half from one of the best towns in the lower Hudson Valley. It combined accessibility with privacy; for after you quitted the cleared lands at the front of the property, and entered the woodland at the back, you were instantly in a stretch of timber which by rights belonged in the Adirondacks. About a third of the land was cleared—or, rather, had been cleared once upon a time. The rest was virgin forest running up to the comb of a little mountain, from the top of which you might see, spread out before you and below you, a panorama with a sweep of perhaps forty miles round three sides of the horizon.
There were dells, glades, steep bluffs and rolling stretches of fallow land; there were seven springs on the place; there was a cloven rift in the hill with a fine little valley at the bottom of it, and the first time I clambered up its slope from the bottom I flushed a big cock grouse that went booming away through the underbrush with a noise like a burst of baby thunder. That settled it for me. All my life I have been trying to kill a grouse on the wing, and here was a target right on the premises. Next day we signed the papers and paid over the binder money. We were landowners. Presently we had a deed in the safe-deposit box and some notes in the bank to prove it.
Over most of our friends we had one advantage. They had taken old-fashioned farms and made them over into modern country places. But once upon a time, sixty or seventy years back, the place of which we were now the proud proprietors had been the property of a man of means and good taste, a college professor; and, by the somewhat primitive standards of those days, it had been an estate of considerable pretensions.
This gentleman had done things of which we were now the legatees. For example, he had spared the fine big trees, which grew about the dooryard of his house; and when he had cleared the tillable acres he had left in them here and there little thickets and little rocky copses which stood up like islands from the green expanses of his meadows. The pioneer American farmer's idea of a tree in a field or on a lawn was something that could be cut down right away. Also the original owner had planted orchards of apples and groves of cherries; and he had thrown up stout stone walls, which still stood in fair order.
But—alas!—he had been dead for more than forty years. And during most of those forty years his estate had been in possession of an absentee landlord, a woman, who allowed a squatter to live on the property, rent free, upon one unusual condition—namely, that he repair nothing, change nothing, improve nothing, and, except for the patch where he grew his garden truck, till no land. As well as might be judged by the present conditions, the squatter had lived up to the contract. If a windowpane was smashed he stuffed up the orifice with rags; if a roof broke away he patched the hole with scraps of tarred paper; if a tree fell its molder-ing trunk stayed where it lay; if brambles sprang up they flourished unvexed by bush hook or pruning blade.