fence and rose on the right to the
high ground where my small work-den stood. A carriage-road wound through
the grounds and up the hill. I staked it out with the English monarchs,
beginning with the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and
clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest down to
Victoria, then in the forty-sixth year of her reign--EIGHT HUNDRED AND
SEVENTEEN YEARS OF English history under your eye at once!

English history was an unusually live topic in America just then. The
world had suddenly realized that while it was not noticing the Queen
had passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and Elizabeth, and gaining
in length every day. Her reign had entered the list of the long ones;
everybody was interested now--it was watching a race. Would she pass
the long Edward? There was a possibility of it. Would she pass the
long Henry? Doubtful, most people said. The long George? Impossible!
Everybody said it. But we have lived to see her leave him two years
behind.

I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and
at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three-foot white-pine
stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it.
Abreast the middle of the porch-front stood a great granite flower-vase
overflowing with a cataract of bright-yellow flowers--I can't think of
their name. The vase of William the Conqueror. We put his name on it
and his accession date, 1066. We started from that and measured off
twenty-one feet of the road, and drove William Rufus's state; then
thirteen feet and drove the first Henry's stake; then thirty-five feet
and drove Stephen's; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past
the summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five, ten, and
seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John; turned the curve
and entered upon just what was needed for Henry III.--a level, straight
stretch of fifty-six feet of road without a crinkle in it. And it lay
exactly in front of the house, in the middle of the grounds. There
couldn't have been a better place for that long reign; you could stand
on the porch and see those two wide-apart stakes almost with your eyes
shut. (Fig. 2.)

That isn't the shape of the road--I have bunched it up like that to save
room. The road had some great curves in it, but their gradual sweep was
such that they were no mar to history. No, in our road one could tell
at a glance who was who by the siz