longer we can make each one last, the happier and better and younger we
shall be.

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CHAPTER FOUR

I

_There is compensation even for moving_

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On the 1st of October we moved. Ah, me! How easily one may dismiss in
words an epic thing like that. Yet it is better so. Moves, like
earthquakes, are all a good deal alike, except as to size and the extent
of destruction. Few care for the details. I still have an impression of
two or three nightmarish days that began with some attempt at real
packing and ended with a desperate dropping of anything into any
convenient box or barrel or bureau drawer, and of a final fevered
morning when two or more criminals in the guise of moving-men bumped and
scraped our choicest pieces down tortuous stairways and slammed them
into their cavernous vans, leaving on the pavement certain unsightly,
disreputable articles for every passer-by to scorn.

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It is true that this time we had a box-car--we had never before risen to
that dignity--and I recall a weird traveling to and fro with the vans,
and intervals of anguish when I watched certain precious, and none too
robust, examples of the antique fired almost bodily into its deeper
recesses. Oh, well, never mind; it came to an end. Our goods arrived at
the Brook Ridge station, and Westbury and his teams transported
them--not to the house, but to the barn, for among other things in Brook
Ridge we had unearthed an old cabinet-maker whom we had engaged for the
season to put us in order before we set our possessions in place. He
erected a bench in the barn, and there for a month he glued and scraped
and polished and tacked, and as each piece was finished we brought it in
and tried it in one place and another, discovering all over again how
handsome it was, restored and polished, and now at last in its proper
setting.

There was compensation even for moving in getting settled in that
progressive way, each evening marking a step toward completion. When our
low book shelves were ranged in the spaces about the walls, the books
wiped and put into them; when our comfortable chairs were drawn about
the fireplaces; when our tall clock with a shepherdess painted on the
dial had found its place between the windows and was ticking
comfortably--we felt that our dream of that first day was coming true,
and that the reality was going to be even better than the dream.

[Illustration: _Sometimes at the