The leaves, as I saw them, touched by the autumn, glowed with crimson like sumac. The house is approached by steps of easy grade. There is a little reception-room at the left of the hall, and the dining-room is on the same floor. You mount a flight of stairs, and come to the library and study, at the back, and the parlor in front. _Vlan!_ as the French have it--what a flood of light in this study! The shades of the three wide windows are drawn up to the very top; it is like being at the seaside; there are no owlish habits about a writer who can stand this. It is, in fact, the seaside, so why should it not seem like it? The bold waters of the Back Bay, a wide basin of the Charles River, dash up to the very verge of the small dooryard, in which the clothes hang out to dry. It looks as if they might some day take a notion to come in and call on the cook in the kitchen, or even lift up the whole establishment bodily, and land it on some new Ararat. This stretch of water is thought to resemble the canal of the Guidecca, at Venice; Henry James, with others, has certified to the view as Venetian. You take the Cambridge gas-works for Palladio’s domes, and Bunker Hill Monument, which is really more like a shot-tower, for a _campanile_; and then, at sunset, when the distant buildings are black upon the glowing, ruddy sky, the analogy is not so very remote. All the buildings on this new-made land are set upon piles, and the tides, in a measure, flow under them twice a day. It was a serious question at the beginning, whether there should not be canals here instead of streets; but, considering that the canals would be frozen up a large part of the year, the verdict was against them. I am rather sorry for this: it would have been interesting to see what kind of gondoliers the Boston hackmen and car-drivers would have made. Would they have worn uniforms? Would they have sung, to avoid collisions, in rounding the corners of Exeter and Fairfield streets? Ah me! for those plaintive ballads that might have been? It would have been interesting to see the congregation of Phillips Brooks’s church--the much-vaunted Trinity--going to service by water, and the visitors to the Art Museum, and the students to the Institute of Technology. All these are but a stone’s-throw from Howells. Howells may congratulate himself on a greater solidity for his share of the land than most, for fifty years ago, when there were tide-mills in this neighborhood, it was the site of a toll-house. _Terra firma_, all about him, has an antiquity of but from twelve to twenty years. His house is perhaps a dozen years old, and he has owned it but four.