And so she did. One day toward nightfall--when in the country all the world seems to get mellow--we came upon a little story and a half house connected by a shed with a ramshackly looking barn. It was half hidden behind trees and lilac bushes on the top of a knoll which sloped to a small lake some fifty rods distant. There wasn’t another house within sight of it--just woodland and pasture and fields. Standing there on the old granite doorstep, you wouldn’t have believed there was a city within a long day’s journey. We had the key and went inside. The rooms were low studded and the windows came down to within two feet of the floor. The ceilings were discolored and the paper was off in great patches where the roof had leaked. But in spite of this the place somehow was like home. Ruth took my arm with a tight squeeze and looked up at me. “This is it, Billy,” she said. I wasn’t so sure as she was until all excited she began to tell me what she was going to do. With the birds singing outside and the lazy sun streaming through the windows slantwise, she led me through every room, selecting her papers, making her changes, and placing her furniture. “We don’t want a single new thing in this house,” she exclaimed. “We want to keep it just as it was and don’t you see how it was?” I hadn’t ever lived in the country and so I didn’t, but she made it so vivid to me before we left that evening that I felt as though I had been born here. “We must visit all the houses in the neighborhood and buy what furniture we can right here,” she said. “Maybe there’ll be an auction. Country people are always selling off their old stuff so we must keep our eyes open.” “I should think it would be a lot simpler to buy what we want in town and be done with it,” I said. “But we don’t want to be done with it, Billy,” she answered. “We can’t come slam bang into an old house like this. We must grow into it.” She was so happy that I didn’t say anything more. I knew that she was right, whatever I thought. I’d trust Ruth’s instinct against my judgment any time. I found that I could secure some fifty acres around the house and this was what pleased me. The lot included woodland, pasture and field, but mostly pasture grown up to alders and scrub pine. But however poor the land was, it was land, and that was what I was hungry for. I wanted to look out the windows and see land and walk over it and feel it beneath my feet, knowing I owned it. I wanted to feel that I had a certain section of these United States of America which belonged to me and my heirs forever and ever. To have this would seem like being taken into the firm. When I came to look up the deeds I felt this more keenly than ever. I was able to trace the title back to an old Indian grant, for it had been held in one family over two hundred years and had changed title only twice since then. This in itself brought history mighty close.