From the home you could not look in any
direction without seeing a picture of beauty.
"Last spring," the author writes in a recent letter, "I went back
with my mind fully made up to buy that land at any reasonable
price, restore it to the exact condition in which I knew it as a
child, and finish my life there. I found that the house had been
burned, killing all the big trees set by my mother's hands
immediately surrounding it. The hills were shorn and ploughed down,
filling and obliterating the creeks and springs. Most of the forest
had been cut, and stood in corn. My old catalpa in the fence corner
beside the road and the Bartlett pear under which I had my
wild-flower garden were all that was left of the dooryard, while a
few gnarled apple trees remained of the orchard, which had been
reset in another place. The garden had been moved, also the lanes;
the one creek remaining out of three crossed the meadow at the foot
of the orchard. It flowed a sickly current over a dredged bed
between bare, straight banks. The whole place seemed worse than a
dilapidated graveyard to me. All my love and ten times the money I
had at command never could have put back the face of nature as I
knew it on that land."
As a child the author had very few books, only three of her own
outside of school books. "The markets did not afford the miracles
common with the children of today," she adds. "Books are now so
numerous, so cheap, and so bewildering in colour and make-up, that
I sometimes think our children are losing their perspective and
caring for none of them as I loved my few plain little ones filled
with short story and poem, almost no illustration.
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