HIS CHILDREN It was a week later, and we were sitting on the verandah looking out across Essex County towards Manhattan. To us, who some five years before had been shaken from our homestead in San Francisco and hurried penniless and almost naked across the continent, our location here in the Garden State, looking eastward towards the Western Ocean and our native isle, had always appeared as "almost home." We endeavoured to impress this upon our friends in England, explaining that "we could be home in four or five days easily"; and what were four or five days? True, we have never gone so far as to book our passage; but there is undoubted comfort in the fact that in a week at the outside, we could walk down Piccadilly. Out on the Pacific Slope we were, both physically and spiritually, a world away. It pleased us, too, to detect in the configuration of the district a certain identity with our own county of Essex, in England, where a cousin of Bill's had a cottage, and where, some day, we were to have a cottage too. Our home is called _Wigboro' House_, after the cousin's, and we have settled it that, just as you catch a glimpse of grey sea across Mersea Island from Wigborough, so we may catch the glint and glare of the lights of Manhattan, and, on stormy nights, feel on our lips the sharpness of the salt wind that blows across Staten Island from the Atlantic. It is an innocent conceit, and our only critic so far had been Miss Fraenkel, who had objected to the name, and advocated with American succinctness the advantage of a number. As Bill had remarked mournfully, "It wouldn't be so bad if it was number three or four, but _Five hundred and Eighty-two Van Diemen's Avenue_ is horrible!" We had given in to Miss Fraenkel of course, save that none of us had the courage to disillusion Bill's cousin. We still received from him letters addressed in his sprawling painter's hand "_Wigboro' House, Netley Heights, N. J., U. S. A._," a mail or so late. We never told him of _Van Diemen's Avenue_, nor for that matter had we mentioned our neighbours. Curiously enough, it was he, that painter cousin of Bill's, thousands of miles away in that other Essex, who told _us_ something that we were only too quick to appreciate, about our neighbours.