mmonplace book. I find that if I wait for clever thoughts and
important events, my journal shows portentous gaps at the end of the
week, and I promised myself that I would write something in it every
day while I was at Nepaug. For my part, I enjoy the old-fashioned
diary,--a sort of almanac, confessional, receipt-book, and daily paper
rolled together; so I will just go on in my humdrum way. As it is only
for myself, I need not fear to be as garrulous and egotistical as I
please. Besides, a journal is such a good escape-valve for one's
feelings! Having written them out, one is so much less impelled to
confide them, and confidences are generally a mistake--yes, I am sure
of it. They only intensify feelings, and at my age that is not
desirable. At twenty, we put spurs into our emotions. At fifty, we put
poultices onto them.

CHAPTER II

MINGLED YARN

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."

The road from the station at South East to Nepaug Beach was long and
dusty, tedious enough to the traveller at any time, but especially on
this July afternoon when the sun beat down pitilessly upon its arid
stretches, and the dust, stirred by passing wheels, rose in choking
masses.

Jonathan Flint, however, surveyed the uninteresting length of highway
with grim satisfaction. It was the inaccessibility and general lack of
popular attractions which had led him to select Nepaug as a summering
place. Mosquitoes and sand-fleas abounded; but one need not say
"good-morning" to mosquitoes and sand-fleas, it is true. The fare at
the inn was poor; but one was spared that exchange of inanities which
makes the average hotel appear a kindergarten for a lunatic asylum;
and, finally, the tediousness of the journey was a safeguard against
the far greater tedium resulting from the companionship of "nauseous
intruders," striding in white duck, or simpering under rose-lined
parasols.

The horse which was drawing the ramshackle carryall in which Flint
sat, toiled on with sweating haunches, switching his tail, impatient
of the flies, and now and then shaking his head deprecatingly, as if
in remonstrance against the fate which destined him to work so hard
for the benefit of a lazy human being reclining at ease behind him.

Flint was, indeed, the image of slothful content, as he sat silent by
the side of old Marsden, who drove like a woman, with a rein in e