Not wishing to spend another winter where we were, we returned to Brooklyn and remained with my parents until the new house was completed.
When we commenced our packing preparatory to leaving the little farm, as we called it, there was a feeling akin to homesickness.
We had been very happy and great blessings had come to us while there. The dear little baby girl, my health, prosperity in worldly affairs—all this and the thought of how the place had been a sort of lovers' retreat, where I had my wife all to myself most of the time, made the homely old farm-house seem something sacred.
We could not but feel a little sentimental over it all.
The garden, the arbor-vitae hedge, planted with my own hands, and now tall and almost impenetrable, the play-house which I built in the orchard for the children, all had to be visited with a feeling of saying good-by to old friends.
There was hardly a summer for years after that we did not at least once drive down the old lane and look over the place where our country life had commenced, and I shall have for it always a tender spot in my memory.
When, at the end of the year, the books were closed at the office, I was pleased to find that I had made a little over twelve thousand dollars.
It had taken me eight years to catch up to the point where Mr.
Derham left off, but I had finally succeeded.
As I was but twenty-eight years of age, I congratulated myself with a little self-conceit that was perhaps pardonable.
It had certainly been a hard up-hill fight.