He gave me the direction--"and there by the roadside you'll find a sort of wooden archway with a sign over it ... you step in and follow the path, and that will take you right into the centre of the community. But what do want to go to Eden for? they're all a bunch of nuts there!" "Maybe I might be a nut, too!" The old man laughed. "Well, good-bye and good luck, sonny." Soon I reached the gateway, trailing my heavy suitcase ... heavy mostly with manuscripts.... A woodland path led me into what seemed, and was, a veritable forest; boughs interlaced above, with glimpses of blue sky between. In interspaces of trees wild flowers grew. Luxuriant summer was abroad. I stepped out of the forest straightway into the community. It was in a beautiful open space like a natural meadow. There stood the houses of the colonists--Single Taxers, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists,--folk of every shade of radical opinion ... who here strove to escape the galling mockeries of civilisation and win back again to pastoral simplicity. It was a community such as William Morris or some Guild Socialist of a medieval turn of mind might have conceived. It was the Dream of John Ball visualised. "When Adam dolve and Eve span Who was then the gentleman?" Toy houses picturesquely set under trees that fringed the Common ... houses with different, quaint colours ... the "green" in the centre carefully cropped as if nibbled by sheep ... well-kept paths of parti-coloured stone, as if each pebble had been placed there by hand.... Everything here was born obviously of the Arts and Crafts movement, a movement which seeks to teach that each shall make and build for himself ... if clumsily, yet uniquely ... the product to be something at least individual and warm from the maker's personality. I thought of Jusserand's _English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages_. If the Canterbury Pilgrims, led by jolly Harry Bailey, their host, had burst out from the woods, on horseback, singing and jesting, I should not have considered their appearance an anachronism.... A tousle-headed girl-child in rompers which she was too big for, pointed me Baxter's house, the largest in the community. There seemed to be no one home when I dropped my suitcase on the front porch.... I knocked vigorously. No one came. I waited a long while. "A hell of a way to welcome me!" I meditated, my egotism hurt. Again I knocked. "Come in! do come in!" a gentle voice bade--it was Mrs. Baxter's. I pushed the door open and stepped in. I set down my heavy suitcase with a thump, on the bare, hardwood floor of the large room in which I found myself--a room sparsely furnished, its walls lined with books. It had one large window, under and along which was built in, a long, wide shelf made into a sort of divan, promiscuous with cushions. Propped up with a disordered heap of these cushions sat Mrs. Hildreth Baxter, in blouse and bloomers; she was reading.