The Idyl of Twin Fires

But this story is, after all, an idyl, and the idyl is drawing to its close. Even as the Old Three Decker carried tired people to the Islands of the Blest, my little tale can on...

As A matter of fact, I didn't. I went to sleep again at five, and slept till seven. It's not nearly so easy as it sounds in books to change all your habits of life. But I resolv...

After dinner she approved the sundial beds with a mock-judicial gravity, and then she went at the trellis, working with a kind of impersonal nervous intensity that troubled me,...

I shall not here recount the events on the farm during the weeks which followed Miss Stella's departure. They did not particularly interest me. My whole psychological make-up ha...

I was sitting at a late hour in my room above the college Yard, correcting daily themes. I had sat at a late hour in my room above the college Yard, correcting daily themes, for...

There are many mysteries of marriage, quite unanticipated by the bachelor before he changes his state. Not the least of them is the new range of social relations and impulses wh...

Miss Goodwin was not there. She had gone for a walk. Disappointed, I went back to my farm, and resolved to clean up the path through the pines, to surprise her. The grove was dr...

Three days later I got a report on the water from a chemist in Springfield; it was pure. Meanwhile, I had decided to tap the town main, so it didn't make any difference, anyway....

The next day the painters left for good. Hard Cider had completed his tasks, Mike had no further need for his son Joe till haying time, and I no longer had an excuse for putting...

The next morning I did not urge Miss Goodwin to come to the farm. In fact, I urged her to sit in the sun and rest. It was a glorious day, a real June day, though June was not du...

"Stella Goodwin." "It's rather a pretty name," I thought, as I read it on the flyleaf of a volume she had left in Mrs. Bert's sitting-room. The volume itself amused me--Chamberl...

The following morning was a balmy and exquisite first of May, but realism again compels me to confess that, having been an English instructor for seven years, and having read ma...

I SPENT considerably more money in July and August. Some of the items would be regarded as necessities even by our rural standards; some my farming neighbours would deem a luxur...

Memorial Day dawned fair and warm. Bert and his wife and all their "help" went off to the village after breakfast. There were no painters in my house, and Mike had milked the co...

Those who know the country only in summer, know it scarcely at all. From the first November snowstorm to the last drift melting before the winds of late March on the northern si...

All that next June day I worked in my garden, in a dream, my hands performing their tasks mechanically. I ran the wheel hoe between the rows of newly planted raspberries and bla...

The next morning I demanded that Mrs. Temple again put me up some lunch. "For," said I, "I'm going to postpone meeting this broken-down wreck of a perhaps once proud female as l...

One of the advantages of being a bachelor when you are building or restoring a house is that you can spend most of your time in the garden. I am by nature a trusting soul anyway...

I spoke as if we were old friends. I spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a young woman to accompany a young man to his house and pick out paint for him....

It was the strangest, sweetest sensation I had ever known to wake in the morning and hear soft singing in the room where a fresh breeze was wandering. I saw Stella standing at t...

I thought I could move into my house on the first of June--but I didn't. A rainy day followed the holiday, and in the rain we first set out the roses, which had arrived by freig...

A pool of water twenty feet long shining in the sun, or glimmering deeply in the twilight, that and nothing else save a few straggling annuals wrongly placed about it--yet it ma...

The excitement of our first spring at Twin Fires will probably never be equalled in our lives, though no spring can recur in a garden without its excitements. But about our firs...

Many people, I presume, long to fly from New York during a late June and early July hot spell. But nobody who does not possess a new place in the country, still unfurnished, wit...

She looked ruefully at her paint-stained fingers, at her old, soiled khaki garden skirt which stopped at least six inches from the ground, and then at my get-up, which consisted...