ision.
There's a romance about the ownership--rather a sacred and beautiful
romance of love, and perhaps that partly accounts for the
extraordinarily romantic effect of the place itself. Only a man inspired
by love could have planned those mysterious flowery openings in the
forest of hemlock which borders the lake as forests edge the lakes in
the Trossachs. Only a man so inspired could have known just how to use
his backgrounds of rock and cliff, or group his irises along the
brookside, and mass his rhododendrons in the sunlight, where they blaze
like the rose-flames of driftwood. I should hardly have been surprised
if the swans floating like great lilies on the shining lake had all
begun to sing some wonderful Wagnerian song in chorus.

We were in a dream as we sailed slowly out (yes, _slowly_, my dear,
because motoring folk are kindly asked, "Hold ye speed to two and half
leagues an hour") on to the Post Road again, under an arch of elms
characteristic of New England, and of pure architectural value.

I could tell you things about each place we glided or tore
through--treesy, yet important and city-like, like Stamford, where they
make the Yale locks that burglars all over the world have cause to
curse; elm-bowered Darien; Norwalk, once a great shipping port for
reluctantly banished oysters, managing still to be picturesque because
of its pretty common where cattle have a _legal_ right to graze; sweet
old Westport, on an inlet of the Sound, dim with elm-shadow; Fairfield,
with its beautiful old and new houses, its "village green," and its
romance of John Hancock, who risked being caught by the British in order
to meet and hastily marry Dorothy Quincy; but then, if I told you all
that Jack and I told each other, there would be no room to tell you of
ourselves. Besides, the whole thing is like a connected, serial story,
in which the Post Road itself plays a leading part. One ought to begin
with the early settlers, making the road which is so perfect now; then
the Continental armies marching along it in the days when it was
(luckily for the fighting Americans) still rough and difficult to
travel. In spite of the neat prosperity nowadays, and the sign-posts
which tell you everything you can possibly want to know about
directions, it is easy to read the faded print of that long serial
romance of generations. Old houses tell it, old trees tell it, old names
tell it, and the very modernness of the new things emphasizes the h