s they would let
me."

He had one of the prettiest places I ever saw--of a poor man's kind, and
spent all the best hours of his life making it lovelier.

"And it's all paid for?" I asked.

He smiled. "No--not by a good deal less than half."

"But suppose something should happen that you couldn't finish paying for
it?"

"Well, then I've had a mighty good time doing it for the other fellow."

That was not to be forgotten.

So I went down the shore with the lumberman, and we sat on the sand
under a pine tree.... On the way home I arranged for excavation and the
foundation masonry.... I'm not going to tell you how to build a house,
because I don't know. I doubt if ever a house was built with a completer
sense of detachment on the part of the nominal owner--at times.... When
they consulted me, I referred to the dream which the architect had
pinned to matter in the form of many blue-prints--for a time.

As the next Spring and the actual building advanced, chaos came down
upon me like the slow effects of a maddening drug. For two years I had
ridden through the little town once or twice a day for mail; and had
learned the pleasure of nodding to the villagers--bankers, doctors,
merchants, artisans, labourers and children. I had seldom entered stores
or houses and as gently as possible refrained from touching the social
system of the place. Our lives were very full on the Shore.

There was a real pleasure to me in the village. Many great ones have
fallen before the illusion of it.... There is a real pleasure to me in
the village still, but different.

Long ago, I went up into the north country and lived a while near a
small Indian party on the shore of a pine-shadowed river. I watched
their life a little. They knew fires and enjoyed tobacco. They feasted
upon the hard, gamey bass, and sent members of their party to the fields
for grains. Their children lived in the sun--a strange kind of
enchantment over it all. I stood high on a rock above the river one
evening across from the Indian camp, with a Canadian official who was a
kind of white father to the remnant of the Indian tribes in that part of
the province. We talked together, and as we talked the sun went down. An
old Indian arose on the bank opposite. In the stillness we heard him tap
out the ashes of his pipe upon a stone. Then he came down like a dusky
patriarch to the edge of the stream, stepped into his canoe and lifted
the paddle.

There was no sound from