dium of the two railway journeys every weekday, and when you have
made friends with your fellow-commuters, you will get to like it, for
your morning trip in will take the place with you of your present
afternoon call at your club. And you are pretty sure to enjoy the
novelty of the first few months. You have moved out in the spring, and,
dulled as your perceptions are by years of city life, you cannot fail to
be astonished and thrilled, and perhaps a little bit awed, at the wonder
of that green awakening. And when you see how the first faint, seemingly
half-doubtful promise of perfect growth is fulfilled by the procession
of the months, you yourself will be moved with the desire to work this
miracle, and to make plants and flowers grow at your own will. You will
begin to talk of what you are going to do next year--for you have taken
a three years' lease, I trust--if only as an evidence of good faith. You
will lay out a tract for your flower garden and your vegetable garden,
and you will borrow your neighbor's seed-catalogue, and you will plan
out such a garden as never blossomed since Eden.

[Illustration]

And in your leisure days, of course, you _will_ enjoy it more or less.
You will sit on your broad veranda in the pleasant mornings and listen
to the wind softly brushing the tree-tops to and fro, and look at the
blue sky through the leaf-framed spaces in the cool, green canopy above
you; and as you remember the cruel, hot, lifeless days of summer in your
town house, when you dragged through the weeks of work that separated
you from the wife and children at the sea-side or in the
mountains--then, Modestus, you must look upon what is before you, and
say: it is good.

It is true that you can't get quite used to the sensation of wearing
your tennis flannels at your own domestic breakfast table, and you
cannot help feeling as if somebody had stolen your clothes, and you were
going around in your pajamas. But presently your friend--for of course
you have followed the trail of a friend, in choosing your new
abode--your friend drops in clad likewise, and you take the children and
start off for a stroll. As the pajama-feeling wears off, you become
quite enthusiastic. You tell your friend that this is the life that you
always wanted to lead; that a man doesn't really live in the city, but
only exists; that it is a luxury to breathe such air, and enjoy the
peaceful calm and perfect silence. Away inside of you something says