the reason for which it was started.” I have described Aldrich’s town house. He passes much of his time at Ponkapog, twelve miles away behind the Blue Hills, and at Lynn, on the sea-coast. “After its black bass and wild duck and teal,” says our author in one of his charming essays, “solitude is the chief staple of Ponkapog.... The nearest railway station (Heaven be praised!) is two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw. Ponkapog has one mail a day; two mails a day would render the place uninhabitable.” He took a large old farmhouse in the secluded place, remodeled it, arranged for himself an attractive working study, and, used to men and cities though he was, for a period made this exclusively his home. His leading motive was the health of his boys, who needed an out-of-door life. Ponkapog owes him a debt of gratitude for spreading its name abroad. Until the publication of his entertaining book of travel sketches, “From Ponkapog to Pesth,” it must have been wholly unheard of, and even then I, for one, can recollect feeling that the appellation was so ingenious as to be probably fictitious. With a continuity that speaks strongly in its favor, Aldrich has passed the summers at Lynn for seventeen years. From these must be excepted, however, the summers of his jaunts to Europe, which are rather frequent. The latest of these took him to the Russian fair at Nijni Novgorod. In another, perhaps unlike any other traveler, he passed a “day [and a day only] in Africa.” At Lynn, he has lived, in different villas, all along the breezy Ocean Road. This is a street worthy of its name, and it has a certain flavor of Newport, being a little remote from the central bustle of the great shoe-manufacturing mart to which it belongs. Others will quote a list of varied advantages for the site; Aldrich will be apt to tell you he likes it for its nearness to the railway station. The present house, of which he has taken a long lease, is a large square wooden villa, painted red. It stands just in the edge of a little indentation known as Deer Cove. “After me, probably--who knows?” says the humorous host, who is not at all afraid of a bit of the common vernacular. Nahant, Little Nahant and minor resorts are in the view in front; Swampscott is three-quarters of a mile away, at the left, and Marblehead at no great distance beyond that. The feature of the water view is the bold little reef of Egg Rock, with three white dots of habitations on its back. “Egg Rock is exactly opposite everywhere. I recollect once trying to find some place to which it was not opposite, just as in childhood I tried once to walk around to the other side of the moon. In this latter case I suppose I must have walked fully two miles.” So my host describes his peculiar experience with it.