Amelie's, in the sun, half the afternoon, watching the
motor hash the apples, and the press squeeze out the yellow juice,
which rushed foaming into big vats. Did you ever drink cider like that?

It is the only way I like it. It carried me back to my girlhood and the
summers in the Sandy River valley. I don't know why it is, of late, that
my mind turns so often back to those days, and with such affection.
Perhaps it is only because I find myself once more living in the
country. It may be true that life is a circle, and as one approaches the
end the beginning becomes visible, and associated with both the
beginning and end of mine there is a war. However it is to be
explained, there remains the fact that my middle distances are getting
wiped out.

In these still nights, when I cannot sleep, I think more often than of
anything else of the road running down the hill by the farm at New
Sharon, and of the sounds of the horses and wagons as they came
down and crossed the wooden bridge over the brook, and of the
voices--so strange in the night--as they passed. There were more
night sounds in those memories than I ever hear here--more crickets,
more turnings over of Nature, asleep or awake. I rarely hear many
night sounds here. From sundown, when people go clattering by in
their wooden shoes from the fields, to daylight, when the birds awake,
all is silence. I looked out into the moonlight before I closed my
shutters last night. I might have been alone in the world. Yet I like it.

The country is lovely here in winter--so different from what I
remember of it at home. My lawn is still green, so is the corbeille
d'argent in the garden border, which is still full of silvery bunches of
bloom, and will be all winter. The violets are still in bloom. Even the
trees here never get black as they do in New England, for the trunks
and branches are always covered with green moss. That is the
dampness. Of course, we never have the dry invigorating cold that
makes a New England winter so wonderful. I don't say that one is
more beautiful than the other, only that each is different in its charm.
After all, Life, wherever one sees it, is, if one has eyes, a wonderful
pageant, the greatest spectacular melodrama I can imagine. I'm glad
to have seen it. I have not always had an orchestra stall, but what of
that? One ought to see things at several angles and from several
elevations, you know.

VII

December 5, 1914

We have been ha