tiful
grandmother of mine, made out of old lace and laughing wrinkles and
mischievous old blue eyes.

There was one little room that particularly interested me, a tiny
bedroom all white, and at the window the red roses were already in bud.
But what caught my eye with peculiar sympathy was a small bookcase, in
which were some twenty or thirty volumes, wearing the same forgotten
expression--forgotten and yet cared for--which lay like a kind of
memorial charm upon everything in the old house. Yes, everything seemed
forgotten and yet everything, curiously--even religiously--remembered. I
took out book after book from the shelves, once or twice flowers fell
out from the pages--and I caught sight of a delicate handwriting here
and there and frail markings. It was evidently the little intimate
library of a young girl. What surprised me most was to find that quite
half the books were in French--French poets and French romancers: a
charming, very rare edition of Ronsard, a beautifully printed edition of
Alfred de Musset, and a copy of Theophile Gautier's _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_. How did these exotic books come to be there alone in a deserted
New England farm-house?

This question was to be answered later in a strange way. Meanwhile I had
fallen in love with the sad, old, silent place, and as I closed the
white gate and was once more on the road, I looked about for someone who
could tell me whether or not this house of ghosts might be rented for
the summer by a comparatively living man.

I was referred to a fine old New England farm-house shining white
through the trees a quarter of a mile away. There I met an ancient
couple, a typical New England farmer and his wife; the old man, lean,
chin-bearded, with keen gray eyes flickering occasionally with a shrewd
humor, the old lady with a kindly old face of the withered-apple type
and ruddy. They were evidently prosperous people, but their minds--for
some reason I could not at the moment divine--seemed to be divided
between their New England desire to drive a hard bargain and their
disinclination to let the house at all.

Over and over again they spoke of the loneliness of the place. They
feared I would find it very lonely. No one had lived in it for a long
time, and so on. It seemed to me that afterwards I understood their
curious hesitation, but at the moment only regarded it as a part of the
circuitous New England method of bargaining. At all events, the rent I
offered finall