At a touch I faced around and beheld, crowning the hill, a stately company of red cedars, comely and dense and mysterious as the cypresses of Tivoli, and gloriously drenched in moonlight.
"But what a place for a house!"
"Let's give up Italy," was the answer, "and make this wood our home."
By instinct and training we were two inveterate wanderers. Never had we possessed so much as a shingle or a spoonful of earth. But the nest-building enthusiasm had us at last. Our hands met in compact. As we strolled reluctantly homeward to a ten-o'clock dinner we talked of road-making, swamps, pneumatic water-systems, the nimbleness of dollars, and mountains of other difficulties. And we agreed that the only kind of faith which can easily remove mountains is the faith of the enthusiast.
V
THE AUTO-COMRADE
uman nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum inside itself. Offer the ordinary man a week's vacation all alone, and he will look as though you were offering him a cell in Sing Sing.