Her declaration seemed somehow to close the incident, and we were all silent a moment, which I employed in looking about the room, and taking in with my literary sense the simplicity and even bareness of its furnishing. There was the bed where the invalid lay, and near the head a table with a pile of books and a kerosene-lamp on it, and I decided that she was a good deal wakeful, and that she read by that lamp when she could not sleep at night. Then there were the hard chairs we sat on, and some home-made hooked rugs, in rounds and ovals, scattered about the clean floor; there was a small melodeon pushed against the wall; the windows had paper shades, and I recalled that I had not seen any blinds on the outside of the house. Over the head of the bed hung a cavalryman’s sword, with its belt--the sword that Mrs. Makely had spoken of. It struck me as a room where a great many things might have happened, and I said: “You can’t think, Mrs. Camp, how glad I am to see the inside of your house. It seems to me so typical.” A pleased intelligence showed itself in her face, and she answered: “Yes, it is a real old-fashioned farmhouse. We have never taken boarders, and so we have kept it as it was built pretty much, and only made such changes in it as we needed or wanted for ourselves.” “It’s a pity,” I went on, following up what I thought a fortunate lead, “that we city people see so little of the farming life when we come into the country. I have been here now for several seasons, and this is the first time I have been inside a farmer’s house.” “Is it possible!” cried the Altrurian, with an air of utter astonishment; and, when I found the fact appeared so singular to him, I began to be rather proud of its singularity. “Yes, I suppose that most city people come and go, year after year, in the country, and never make any sort of acquaintance with the people who live there the year round. We keep to ourselves in the hotels, or, if we go out at all, it is to make a call upon some city cottager, and so we do not get out of the vicious circle of our own over-intimacy with ourselves and our ignorance of others.” “And you regard that as a great misfortune?” asked the Altrurian. “Why, it’s inevitable. There is nothing to bring us together, unless it’s some happy accident, like the present. But we don’t have a traveler from Altruria to exploit every day, and so we have no business to come into people’s houses.” “You would have been welcome in ours long ago, Mr. Twelvemough,” said Mrs. Camp. “But, excuse me,” said the Altrurian, “what you say really seems dreadful to me. Why, it is as if you were not the same race or kind of men!”