There are really two of the-most-beautiful-place-in-the-world. One of them is the real outdoors; and the other is outdoors in the Land of Make-Believe. The advantage of the real outdoors is that its loveliness is ready-made. One invents nothing; one merely opens eyes and ears and soul to drink in beauty and joy, and learns, almost without knowing it, the most curious and interesting things. The advantage of Make-Believe is that when things are as they shouldn’t be, one can instantly step over into that blessed country and make them be exactly what they should. No one ever sees you do it, either, or guesses that you can make a world in a twinkling, out of dreams. It has all the charm and mystery of a fairy ring, or fern seed, or Aladdin’s lamp. One’s body can perch on a horsehair piano stool, twisting one’s two little meat legs about its one fat leg of rosewood, and great-aunts may be sure you are practising scales most faithfully; and all the time you are really running races in the wind with charming, dirty children who tear their dresses all day long, and never had their hair in curl-papers in their lives. And that is only the beginning. For one can learn so well the road to that dear land that one never forgets it, even in grown-up days. There is never any sickness in Make-Believe. One can walk and run there always, though one’s body lies weak and helpless, or drags slowly about, year after year, in a world that is full of pain. One can slip away from the long, black, sleepless nights into a lovely world where imagination is the motive power, and all one needs and all one longs for lie ready to one’s hand. * * * * * It was the January after I was sixteen that Cedarhurst burned down. It was a bitter cold time; and the heaviest snow I had ever seen turned my familiar world into fairyland under the winter moon. It was Great-aunt Letitia who found the fire. She had been looking for it all her life. One of the most familiar memories of my childhood is the waking at night to hear a soft rustle past my open door—the doors were always left open that we might smell the fire when we really had one—and to see Great-aunt Letitia, her white hair tucked away under a dainty nightcap and the light of her candle bringing out soft gleams in her flowered silk dressing gown, as she followed her highbred nose to the spot where it assured her a fire had broken out. It used to frighten me at first; but I grew too accustomed to it even to wake. So it taxed my credulity to the utmost when, on that bitter night, she roused me to tell me with tense white lips that Cedarhurst was in flames.