The later history of the spot where Cousin Mary dwelt offers its commentary on a fast changing civilization. Soon after her death the little brick house was pulled down and the cubic space it occupied was filled with heavy machinery which daily filled with its reverberations this place which was once the very epitome of quietude. Now, in their turn, the huge presses have given way to one corner of a vast office building where an army of busy clerks pursues the urgent and exacting routine of a great corporation. The Latin poets liked to believe that every locality had its own peculiar divinity--the "genius of the place." What has become of the goddess who for so long dedicated to peacefulness this abode of a benign old age? Is it that she was so closely identified with the one who dwelt there that when that life ceased the guardian angel fled with the departing spirit to some still fairer abode--or is the genius of the place really called Memory, who, in the minds of those who cherish her, effectually preserves against any merely material desecration the places she once held dear? _XIV: The Quiet Life_ "_More than half a century of life has taught me that most of the wrong and folly which darkens earth is due to those who cannot possess their souls in quiet; that most of the good which saves mankind from destruction comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness._" --THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT. WITH the thoughtless cruelty of childhood we used to call him "Thermometer" Tatlock because he was forever watching the temperature. The tradition was that whenever he went down cellar to look at the furnace he arrayed himself in overcoat, fur cap, muffler and arctics. Nicknames are not always brutal and the cruelty of this case lay only in the peculiar features of the situation--the fact, in short, that the subject of our joke was such a gentle, retiring, almost apologetic old gentleman. He was deprecatory even toward us children. To adult reflection it seems ruthless to have made any fun of him at all. Yet there was no doubt about the fact that he was an odd character. The incarnation of bashfulness, he was, like most bashful persons, persistent and consistent in doing just exactly as he liked so far as the demands of a world, not primarily constituted for people of his stripe, allowed. It must be confessed that, in modern parlance, he got away with it pretty successfully.