lan mentally for months and reproduce
it minutely on paper at will. We had learned, too, that it is only by
living in many houses in rotation that you can know the varied charms of
apartment life. No one flat can provide them all.

The new place had its attractions and we passed a merry Christmas there.
Altogether our stay in it was not unpleasant, in spite of the soiled and
soulless Teutonic lady below stairs. I think we might have remained
longer in this place but for the fact that when spring came once more we
were seized with the idea of becoming suburbanites.

We said that a city apartment after all was no place for children, and
that a yard of our own, and green fields, must be found. With the
numerous quick train services about New York it was altogether possible
to get out and in as readily as from almost any point of the upper
metropolis, and that, after all, in the country was the only place to
live.

We got nearly one hundred answers to our carefully-worded advertisement
for a house, or part of a house, within certain limits, and the one
selected was seemingly ideal. Green fields behind it, a railroad station
within easy walking distance, grasshoppers singing in the weeds across
the road. We strolled, hand in hand with the Precious Ones, over sweet
meadows, gathering dandelions and listening to the birds. We had a lawn,
too, and sunny windows, and we felt free to do as we chose in any part
of our domain, even in the basement, for here there was no janitor.

We rejoiced in our newly-acquired freedom, and praised everything from
the warm sunlight that lay in a square on the matting of every room to
the rain that splashed against the windows and trailed across the
waving fields. It is true we had a servant now--Rosa, of whom I shall
speak later--but even the responsibility (and it _was_ that) of this
acquirement did not altogether destroy our happiness. Summer and autumn
slipped away. The Precious Ones grew tall and brown, and the old cares
and annoyances of apartment life troubled us no more.

But with the rigors and gloom and wretchedness of winter the charms of
our suburban home were less apparent. The matter of heat became a
serious question, and the memory of steam radiators was a haunting one.
More than once the Little Woman was moved to refer to our "cosy little
apartment" of the winter before. Also, the railway station seemed
farther away through a dark night and a pouring rain, the fields were
gray