There were no books or even writing materials in the house. “When I have to go in to town for supplies, I get my extremely urgent mail and reply to it while at the post office,” he explained. “But I wish nothing inky about the hermitage.” Thurley, who had first viewed the little house and the wild surroundings with dismay as to what she would ever do with herself, fell to work within a few days and became a busy Martha engrossed with house and outdoor work, plying the axe while Hobart was away, replanting flower beds, picking berries, climbing trees to sit astride some sturdy limb and dream of nothing, actually to forget language, as it were, entering the realm of delicious thought, rejoicing in merely singing _sounds_ as did the birds, instead of clumsy words needing to be phrased and accented. “I never knew any one could be so busy in such a wilderness,” she told Hobart one late afternoon when they had tramped clear to the sea-coast and sat resting before they journeyed homeward with the aid of barn lanterns. “Because you and I and other creatures who live by their wits most of the time and have the tasks of physical existence performed for them, need to remember that one can almost see and feel the truth of eternity ... the eternal seasons, Thurley, the ever-dying, ever-reviving blossoms, the migration of the birds, the continual progress and continual decay of all forms of life—that is what makes us really seem so busy. Because most of the time we are nibbling at a fragment of this supreme truth, boxed up in a steam-heated apartment with a man and a maid and an engagement tablet to be our aids, we sing some silly opera and return to the apartment convinced we are quite indispensable to mankind. We need to come to such a place as this and humbly realize eternity. That is why I named the little house Blessed Memory, because I carry the thought with me when I lock the door for the long, white winter.” Thurley was silent, the most sympathetic answer she could have made. She was mentally quoting, “Cool girdles and crests of the sea gods, “Bright hollows of billowy foam” —as suitable for the scene. It was a quiet sea haven they had found. Bliss had tramped there many times, he told her. Around them were wet sea wrack and pungent bog myrtle, tall protruding cliffs with the green grass clinging to them and dusky birds incessantly slipping about. The sea itself was a shadowy, gray wilderness broken with rosy trails which led to darkish mystery. In the sky a star trembled. “Tell me more,” she demanded childishly.