I suppose too that the contrast with our narrow quarters of the last few years had something to do with our joy in the broader prospect. Not that we had ever felt crowded. We had in our tenement all the room we needed and our lives had been so full that we didn’t notice our quarters anyway. Our lives were still full but with more leisure and less strain we wanted more than we needed. We were like pioneers--content at the start with a log cabin or even a tent, but with prosperity desiring larger and better quarters more as a matter of comfort than necessity. We were now ready for a few of the luxuries of life but we recognized frankly the fact that our new inclinations were luxuries. If success had been longer in coming than it was, we would have remained where we were in perfect contentment. It was hard for us to decide on any of the many old houses we explored because to us they all looked attractive. The thing we both liked about them in spite of signs of decay was that they all seemed so firmly established. There was nothing flimsy about them. They looked as though they had become rooted in the soil like the big elms which grew before so many of them. It was as though the winds and the sun and the rain had tested them and found them honest. As Ruth said, in going into them you wouldn’t feel as though you were beginning life again as you might in a brand new house, but were only starting where the last owner left off. After our experiences during the last few years we appreciated such details as those. There had been times in the emigrant days when way down deep in our hearts we had felt a little bit like people without a country. We were pioneers and we gloried in that, but we were pioneers without a fatherland. We had no sunny Italy, no emerald isle, no gay France, not even a grim Russia to talk about over a pipe at the end of the day as our neighbors had. We had to go back a century or more to get home, and vivid as that past seemed at times it was distinctly a past in which we had played no part. Now out here in the country where we saw stone walls built by our forefathers, where the land had been tilled by them, where trees planted by them were still growing, where if not direct descendants of our own, descendants of the old stock still lived, we felt closer to that history. So we thought that if we went into one of the old houses built by our forefathers, it would bring us still nearer home. We spent almost a month this way, anxious to draw out the pleasure as long as possible. “I’ll know our home as soon as I see it,” said Ruth; “I’ll recognize it like an old friend.”