hat! You would get what you want there."

Her advice rather appealed to my fancy. I at once set about looking for
a New England farmhouse in which I might be received as a "summer
boarder." Hearing of one that was situated in a particularly healthful
and beautiful section of New England, I wrote to the woman who owned and
operated it, telling her what I required, and asking her whether or no
she could provide me with it. "Above all things," I concluded my letter,
"I want quiet."

Her somewhat lengthy reply ended with these words: "The bedroom just
over the music-room is the quietest in the house, because no one is in
the music-room excepting for a social hour after supper. I can let you
have that bedroom."

My friend had said that nothing was so "really countrified" as a New
England farm. But a "music-room," a "social hour after supper!" The
terms suggested things distinctly urban.

I sent another letter to the woman to whom this amazing farmhouse
belonged. "I am afraid I cannot come," I wrote. "I want a simpler
place." Then, yielding to my intense curiosity, I added: "Are many of
your boarders musical? Is the music-room for their use?"

"No place could be simpler than this," she answered, by return mail. "I
don't know whether any of my boarders this year will be musical or not.
Some years they have been. The music-room isn't for my boarders,
especially; it is for my niece. She is very musical, but she doesn't get
much time for practising in the summer."

She went on to say that she hoped I would decide to take the bedroom
over the music-room. I did. I had told her that, above all things, I
desired quiet; but, after reading her letters, I think I wished, above
all things, to see the music-room, and the niece who was musical.

"She will probably be a shy, awkward girl," one of my city neighbors
said to me; "and no doubt she will play 'The Maiden's Prayer' on a
melodeon which will occupy one corner of the back sitting-room. You will
see."

In order to reach the farm it was necessary not only to take a journey
on a train, but also to drive three miles over a hilly road. The little
station at which I changed from the train to an open two-seated carriage
in waiting for me was the usual rural village, with its one main street,
its commingled post-office and dry-goods and grocery store, and its
small white meeting-house.

The farm, as we approached it, called to mind the pictures of old New
England farms with which