I didn’t know anything about real estate values then, but judging from the prices suburban property was bringing I had an idea that a fairly decent place with buildings would cost me around ten thousand dollars. I found that for this sum I could get a fourteen room Colonial house with land enough for a park. After living where the same amount of land would almost make a ward, I was staggered. I thought there must be something crooked in the proposition. But I went to the other agencies and found the same bargains open to me. It seemed that farms were a drug on the market. And this was in a section of the country which had been settled for over two hundred and fifty years! There’s something to think about in that. It was within a ten cent car fare of a region which was absorbing emigrants by the hundred thousand. It was on the very outskirts of a city which was howling about congestion and moaning over the high cost of living. Land was actually lying idle almost within sight of a market pleading for more produce. It certainly looked queer. These facts, however, didn’t concern me at the time. As soon as I made sure the facts were actually as represented, I set about making a selection. To Ruth and me this was like living our honeymoon all over again. Perhaps it was more like living our youth again, for we hadn’t ever passed our honeymoon. I’d go over the lists with her in the evening and we’d check off the places that sounded good to us, and then on the first fair morning we’d start to hunt them up. She’d leave the baby at home with some of our good neighbors and we’d go as far as we could on the electric cars and then walk. I wanted to have a carriage but she wouldn’t hear of it because she wanted to feel free. Some days she pretended we were gypsies and other days that we were two Indians hunting a spot to camp. I didn’t mind, because Dick was looking after most of the business now so I could take my time without worrying about that. In this way we squandered whole days along the country roads going through one old house after another and eating our lunch by the side of a brook or in a bit of woods. I think there must have been something in our blood inherited from our ancestors, for we took to the open road as though we’d been born by its side. Oh, but those were good days--those days when we wandered about at our will in search of a home. It was June and the fields were full of flowers and the air full of birds. Ruth knew them every one and greeted them like old friends, pointing them out to me. I could tell a crow from a robin and a daisy from a buttercup, but that was about all, and yet to me also these wild things were like old friends. I had never missed them, but after the first day I knew I could never do without them again. It was just as I had felt about Ruth from the first time I saw her.