Unluckily—­since you expect me to write often—­I am a creature of habit.

I never could write as you can, with a pad on my knees, huddled over the fire.  I suppose that I could have acquired the habit if I had begun my education at the Sorbonne, instead of polishing off there.  I remember when I first began to haunt that university, eighteen years ago, how amazed I was to see the students huddled into a small space with overcoats and hats on their knees, a note-book on top of them, an ink-pot in one hand and a pen in the other, and, in spite of obstacles, absorbed in the lecture.  I used to wonder if they had ever heard of “stylos,” even while I understood, as I never had done before, the real love of learning that marks the race.  Alas!  I have to be halfway comfortable before I can half accomplish anything.

I am thankful to say that the temperature has been moderating a little, and life about me has been active.  One day it was the big threshing-machine, and the work was largely done by women, and the air was full of throbbing and dust.  Yesterday it was the cider-press, and I stood about, at Amelie’s, in the sun, half the afternoon, watching the motor hash the apples, and the press squeeze out the yellow juice, which rushed foaming into big vats.  Did you ever drink cider like that?

It is the only way I like it.  It carried me back to my girlhood and the summers in the Sandy River valley.  I don’t know why it is, of late, that my mind turns so often back to those days, and with such affection.  Perhaps it is only because I find myself once more living in the country.  It may be true that life is a circle, and as one approaches the end the beginning becomes visible, and associated with both the beginning and end of mine there is a war.  However it is to be explained, there remains the fact that my middle distances are getting wiped out.

In these still nights, when I cannot sleep, I think more often than of anything else of the road running down the hill by the farm at New Sharon, and of the sounds of the horses and wagons as they came down and crossed the wooden bridge over the brook, and of the voices—­so strange in the night—­as they passed.  There were more night sounds in those memories than I ever hear here—­more crickets, more turnings over of Nature, asleep or awake.  I rarely hear many night sounds here.  From sundown, when people go clattering by in their wooden shoes from the fields, to daylight, when the birds awake, all is silence.  I looked out into the moonlight before I closed my shutters last night.  I might have been alone in the world.  Yet I like it.