It was quite early in the spring, if I remember, when they moved into the cottage-a newly married couple, evidently: the wife very young, pretty, and with the air of a lady, the husband somewhat older, but still in the first flush of manhood. It was understood in the village that they came from Baltimore; but no one knew them personally, and they brought no letters of introduction. (For obvious reasons I refrain from mentioning names.) It was clear that, for the present at least, their own company was entirely sufficient for them. They made noadvances towards acquaintance of any of the families in the neighbourhood, and consequently were left to themselves. That apparently was what they desired, and why they came to Ponkapog. For, after its black bass and wild duck and teal, solitude is the chief staple of Ponkapog. Perhaps its perfect rural loveliness should be included. Lying high up under the wing of the Blue Hills, and in the odorous breath of pines and cedars, it happens to be the most enchanted bit of unlaced, dishevelled country within fifty miles of Boston, which, moreover, can be reached in half an hour"s ride by railway. But the rearest railway station (Heaven be praised!) is two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw.
"Are you not going to call on them? "I asked my wife one morning.
"When they call on us, " she replied lightly.
"But it is our place to call first, they being strangers. " This was said as seriously as the circumstances demanded, but my wife turned it off with a laugh, and I said no more, always trusting to her intuition in these matters.
She was right. She would not have been received, and a cool "Not at home " would have been a bitter social pill to us if we had gone out of our way to be courteous.
I saw a great deal of our neighbours, nevertheless. Their cottage lay between us and the post office-where he was never to be met with by any chance-and I caught frequent glimpses of the two working in the garden. Horticulture did not appearso much an object as exercise.
The new-comers were evidently persons of refined musical taste : the lady had a contralto voice of remarkable sweetness, although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a morning by the high gate and listen to her singing, probably at some window upstairs, for the house was not visible from the turnpike. The husband, somewhere about the grounds, would occasionally respond with two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal, Arcadian business. They seemed very happy together, these two persons, who asked no odds whatever of the community in which they had settled themselves.
