well. Some wild grape is started, but that must
be watched for it is a beautiful murderer....

I want to get back to the Shore. Something was met there the first
summer that I yearn for again--close to the sand, close to the voices of
the water. The children often tell me what I feel. To them the stones
have their gnomes, the water its sprites, and the sand a spirit of
healing. There, too, the sunlight is so intense and vitalising as it
plays upon the water and penetrates the margin.

The clay bluff is finding its grade, since it is spared the wash from
beneath. That which breaks from erosion above straightens it out below,
and in time it will find a permanent slope (something near thirty
degrees, they say) that cannot be approached for beauty by any
artificial process. I would not miss one of the natural shelves or
fissures. The Japanese are interesting in their treatment of slopes.
Something of the old temples and stonepaved paths--a trickle of water
over the stones, deep shadows and trailing vines--something of all this
will come to the clay bluff, if time is given to play on. But that is
last, as the Shore was first.... I brought a willow trunk there this
Spring and let the waves submerge it in sand. There are fifty small
shoots springing up; and they will fight their way with each other, the
leaders surviving. I planted one cedar on the Shore. It is good to
plant a cedar. You are working for posterity.

The first Fall came, and nothing had been done above, though I had begun
to have visions of a Spanish house there, having seen one that I could
not forget somewhere in Luzon. A north-country house should have a
summer heart, which is a fountain, and a winter heart which is a
fireplace. I wanted both. The thought of it became clearer and
clearer--a blend of _patio_ and broad hearth--running water and red
firelight--built of stone and decorated with ivy. A stone house with a
roof of wired glass over a _patio_ paved with brick; the area sunken
slightly from the entrance; a balcony stretching around to connect the
sleeping rooms, and rimmed with a broad shelf of oak, to hold the palms,
urns, ferns and winter plants.

All this in a grove of elms and beeches, as I saw it--and as yet, there
wasn't a tree on the place. First of all there needed to be a work-shop
to finance the main-dream. That was built in the Fall, after the reverse
was put on the devouring conditions of the Shore.

3

STONESTUDY

Somewher