e hamlet less than thirty miles from Paris.
It is in that district between Paris and Meaux little known to the
ordinary traveler. It only consists of less than a dozen rude
farm-houses, less than five miles, as a bird flies, from Meaux, which,
with a fair cathedral, and a beautiful chestnut-shaded promenade on the
banks of the Marne, spanned just there bylines of old mills whose
water-wheels churn the river into foaming eddies, has never been popular
with excursionists. There are people who go there to see where Bossuet
wrote his funeral orations, in a little summer-house standing among
pines and cedars on the wall of the garden of the Archbishop's palace,
now, since the "separation," the property of the State, and soon to be a
town museum. It is not a very attractive town. It has not even an
out-of-doors restaurant to tempt the passing automobilist.

My house was, when I leased it, little more than a peasant's hut. It is
considerably over one hundred and fifty years old, with stables and
outbuildings attached whimsically, and boasts six gables. Is it not a
pity, for early association's sake, that it has not one more?

I have, as Traddles used to say, "Oceans of room, Copperfield," and no
joking. I have on the ground floor of the main building a fair sized
salon, into which the front door opens directly. Over that I have a
long, narrow bed-room and dressing-room, and above that, in the eaves, a
sort of attic work-shop. In an attached, one-story addition with a
gable, at the west of the salon, I have a library lighted from both east
and west. Behind the salon on the west side I have a double room which
serves as dining and breakfast-room, with a guest-chamber above. The
kitchen, at the north side of the salon, has its own gable, and there is
an old stable extending forward at the north side, and an old grange
extending west from the dining-room. It is a jumble of roofs and
chimneys, and looks very much like the houses I used to combine from my
Noah's Ark box in the days of my babyhood.

All the rooms on the ground floor are paved in red tiles, and the
staircase is built right in the salon. The ceilings are raftered. The
cross-beam in the salon fills my soul with joy--it is over a foot wide
and a foot and a half thick. The walls and the rafters are painted
green,--my color,--and so good, by long trial, for my eyes and my
nerves, and my disposition.

But much as I like all this, it was not this that attra