“It is lovely, after all,” said Miss Farnum, dreamily, voicing his thoughts. Here they were entering a high hanging wood; on the lower side of the road a lofty hewn-stone wall, all overgrown with moss and ivy, surmounted with old-fashioned stone urns now chipped and crumbling away. Over it they could see the winding leaf-heaped walks of a forgotten garden, untended lawns, and old stone garden-seats swathed in moss and mould. “It must be the grounds of some gentleman’s old country-seat,” said Miss Farnum. “Everyone goes farther from the city nowadays.” There was a something begetting thought in this suggestion; the warm sunlight sank sleepily down in the cup there between the woodlands, and the old garden looked like a place where one might take a nap for half a lifetime--say from youth to early old age. It was evidently a place of the old Idlewild, Ik Marvel, Porte-Crayon days, when people lived in their country, wrote of Dobb his ferry, and were as yet unacquainted with Englishmen and other foreigners. There must have been a strong home fragrance in our life in the forties or thereabouts, before the few found out that we are provinces, or the many that we are all the world.... Now they came out by a little water-bay, or lagoon, reaching inland, where the water lay still and a salt crust was on the long plashed grasses. “I suppose the people who live here go to Mount Desert, nowadays,” said Miss Farnum. “I wonder why they left here?” “Malaria,” suggested Wemyss. “There always seems something unreal, impossible about malaria here,” said Arthur. “Malaria is languid, tropical, unsuited to our bleak Northern, Puritan, hard-worked hillsides and meadow bottoms. Consumption, not malaria, is the typical disease.” “It is only lately creeping into New England,” said Wemyss, dryly. Just then a merry burst of laughter was heard from the front; Arthur looked behind him, but there seemed to be no one speaking. The laugh had been from Miss Duval; she turned around at the same moment, her black eyes sparkling from her rosy face. “Isn’t it delightful?” said she to Arthur. There seemed to be no other reason for her laughing than this; and Arthur laughed in accord with her. It was delightful. Now they were up in the highlands again, bowling along a hard straight road between the rows of trees. Continually the merry horn was sounded to warn the slow teams ahead to turn aside, or wake the sleepy milkmen, or pedlars in their carts. The sun, across the river, had already set behind the purple mountains; but eastward, to the right, the hills were light.