It is true that this time we had a box-car--we had never before risen to that dignity--and I recall a weird traveling to and fro with the vans, and intervals of anguish when I watched certain precious, and none too robust, examples of the antique fired almost bodily into its deeper recesses. Oh, well, never mind; it came to an end. Our goods arrived at the Brook Ridge station, and Westbury and his teams transported them--not to the house, but to the barn, for among other things in Brook Ridge we had unearthed an old cabinet-maker whom we had engaged for the season to put us in order before we set our possessions in place. He erected a bench in the barn, and there for a month he glued and scraped and polished and tacked, and as each piece was finished we brought it in and tried it in one place and another, discovering all over again how handsome it was, restored and polished, and now at last in its proper setting. There was compensation even for moving in getting settled in that progressive way, each evening marking a step toward completion. When our low book shelves were ranged in the spaces about the walls, the books wiped and put into them; when our comfortable chairs were drawn about the fireplaces; when our tall clock with a shepherdess painted on the dial had found its place between the windows and was ticking comfortably--we felt that our dream of that first day was coming true, and that the reality was going to be even better than the dream. [Illustration: _Sometimes at the end of the day, as I sat by the waning embers, and watched her moving to and fro between me and the fading autumn fields_] Of course the old living-room was the best of all. Its length and low ceiling and the great fireplace would insure that. We had ranged a row of blue plates, with some of the ancient things from the attic, along the narrow mantel, and it somehow seemed as if they had been there from the beginning. The low double windows were opposite the fireplace. We had our large table there, and between meal-times the Joy liked to spread her toys on it. She wore her hair cut in the Dutch fashion, and sometimes at the end of the day, as I sat by the waning embers and watched her moving to and fro between me and the fading autumn fields, I had the most precious twilight illusion of having stepped backward at least a hundred years.