The landlord looked at me dubiously. But he volunteered this information: “When you leave in the morning, take the back road, up the hollow, toward what we call Slab City. You’ll pass a couple of big estates. About half a mile beyond the second estate, you’ll come to a crossroad. Turn up that a hundred yards or so and ask for Milt Noble at the first house you come to. Maybe he’ll sell.”
It was a glorious April morning when we awoke. The roads were dry. Spring was in the air. The grass had begun to show green on the beautiful lawns of Bentford Main Street. The great elms drooped their slender, bare limbs like cathedral arches. We purred softly up the Slab City road, pleased by the name of it, passed the two estates on the hill outside of the village, and then dipped into a hollow. As this hollow held no extended prospect, the summer estates had ceased on its brim. The road became the narrow dirt track of tradition, bramble-lined. Presently we reached the crossroad. A groggy sign-board stood in the little delta of grass and weeds so characteristic of old New England crossroads, and on it a clumsy hand pointed to “Albany.” As Albany was half a day’s run in a motor car, and no intervening towns were mentioned, there was a fine, roving spirit about this groggy old sign which tickled me.
We ran up the road a hundred yards of the fifty miles to Albany, crossed a little brook, and stopped the motor at what I instantly knew for my abode.
I cannot tell you how I knew it. One doesn’t reason about such things any more than one reasons about falling in love. At least, I’m sure I didn’t, nor could I set out in cold blood to seek a residence, calculating water supply, quality of neighbours, fashionableness of site, nearness to railroad, number of closets, and all the rest. I saw the place, and knew it for mine–that’s all.
As the motor stopped, I took a long look to left and right, sighed, and said to the professor: “I hereby resign my position as instructor in English, to take effect immediately.”
The professor laughed. He didn’t yet believe I meant it.
My grandfather was an Essex County farmer, and lived in a rectangular, simple, lovely old house, with woodsheds rambling indefinitely out behind and a big barn across the road, with a hollow-log watering trough by a pump in front and a picture of green fields framed by the little door at the far end. Grandfather’s house and grandfather’s barn, visited every summer, were the sweetest recollections of my childhood. And here they were again–somewhat dilapidated, to be sure, with a mountain in the barn-door vista instead of the pleasant fields of Essex–but still true to the old Yankee type, with the same old wooden pump by the hollow-log trough, green with moss.
I jumped from the motor and started toward the house on the run.
“Whoa!” cried the professor, laughing, “you poor young idiot!” Then, in a lower tone, he cautioned: “If our friend Milt sees you want this place so badly, he’ll run up the price. Where’s your Yankee blood?”
I sobered down to a walk, and together we slipped behind a century-old lilac bush at the corner of the house, and sought the front of the dwelling unobserved. The house was set with its side to the road, about one hundred feet into the lot. A long ell ran out behind, evidently containing the kitchen and then the sheds and outhouses. The side door, on a grape-shadowed porch, was in this ell, facing the barn across the way. The main body of the dwelling was the traditional, simple block, with a fine old doorway, composed of simple Doric pilasters supporting a hand-hewn broken pediment–now, alas! broken in more than an architectural sense. It was a typical house of the splendid carpenter-and-builder period of a century ago.