I can hardly believe it was only two years ago that I used to climb into the cupola and lock myself away from everything below. There _is_ no cupola now. It was cut off, like an offending wart. I was surprised to discover what a perfectly enormous thing it was as it stood upon the lawn waiting to be carried off. It reminded me of a horse that has fallen down on the pavement--symmetrical enough in its proper position, but dreadfully awkward and absolutely colossal sprawling about on the ground. Why, it took four horses to drag it up to old Silas Morton's. Silas Morton is a farmer up near Sag Hill and he bought my sacred temple for fifteen dollars. He uses it for a hen-house! It seemed to me like sacrilege, but the hens laid eggs in it, Mr. Morton said, as if they were possessed. The upper part of the window-panes in the cupola are made of yellow stained-glass, and he thinks--Silas Morton is kind of an inventor--that the hens have an idea it's sunshine and that spring is coming. I tell him the cupola is inspired. I saw a picture once of a common little farmhouse where Mrs. Eddy wrote her book, "Science and Health." If my book were to be published, and some photographer took a picture of the house in which I wrote it, I guess that old hen-coop would win the prize for an odd spot in which to have an inspiration. With the cupola gone and the French roof entirely obliterated, the iron fence and the iron fountain sold to a junk man, a spreading porte-cochère at one side of the house, a billiard-room at the other, low verandas like a wide brim to a hat surrounding the entire structure, and everything painted a bright yellow trimmed with green, you never in this world would recognise 240 Main Street, once brown and square and ugly. There's a new stable a quarter of a mile back of the house; there are lawns where the vegetable garden used to be; the old apple orchard is now a sunken garden with a pool in the centre. As I write I can hear the trickle of a stream of water that spouts out of the little artificial pond, and catch the prosperous sound of the hum of a lawn-mower run by a motor. The name that Edith has chosen to give to all this grandeur is "The Homestead." It is engraved at the head of every sheet of note-paper in the establishment. The Homestead! You might as well call Windsor Castle the "Bide a Wee" or the "Dewdrop Inn" as this glaring, officious, stone-gated palace anything that suggests plainness and sweet homely comfort. The last time I wrote to Juliet I drew a big black ink line through the words "The Homestead" and wrote above "The Waldorf-Ritz-Plaza."