There was one little room that particularly interested me, a tiny bedroom all white, and at the window the red roses were already in bud.  But what caught my eye with peculiar sympathy was a small bookcase, in which were some twenty or thirty volumes, wearing the same forgotten expression—­forgotten and yet cared for—­which lay like a kind of memorial charm upon everything in the old house.  Yes, everything seemed forgotten and yet everything, curiously—­even religiously—­remembered.  I took out book after book from the shelves, once or twice flowers fell out from the pages—­and I caught sight of a delicate handwriting here and there and frail markings.  It was evidently the little intimate library of a young girl.  What surprised me most was to find that quite half the books were in French—­French poets and French romancers:  a charming, very rare edition of Ronsard, a beautifully printed edition of Alfred de Musset, and a copy of Theophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin.  How did these exotic books come to be there alone in a deserted New England farm-house?

This question was to be answered later in a strange way.  Meanwhile I had fallen in love with the sad, old, silent place, and as I closed the white gate and was once more on the road, I looked about for someone who could tell me whether or not this house of ghosts might be rented for the summer by a comparatively living man.

I was referred to a fine old New England farm-house shining white through the trees a quarter of a mile away.  There I met an ancient couple, a typical New England farmer and his wife; the old man, lean, chin-bearded, with keen gray eyes flickering occasionally with a shrewd humor, the old lady with a kindly old face of the withered-apple type and ruddy.  They were evidently prosperous people, but their minds—­for some reason I could not at the moment divine—­seemed to be divided between their New England desire to drive a hard bargain and their disinclination to let the house at all.

Over and over again they spoke of the loneliness of the place.  They feared I would find it very lonely.  No one had lived in it for a long time, and so on.  It seemed to me that afterwards I understood their curious hesitation, but at the moment only regarded it as a part of the circuitous New England method of bargaining.  At all events, the rent I offered finally overcame their disinclination, whatever its cause, and so I came into possession—­for four months—­of that silent old house, with the white lilacs, and the drowsy barns, and the old piano, and the strange orchard; and, as the summer came on, and the year changed its name from May to June, I used to lie under the apple-trees in the afternoons, dreamily reading some old book, and through half-sleepy eyelids watching the silken shimmer of the Sound.