“It always seems to me that living might be pretty in such places.  All just alike, and snug together.  I should think Mrs. Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Mahoney would have beautiful little ambitions and rivalries about their tidy parlors and kitchens, setting up housekeeping side by side, as they do.  I should think they might have such nice neighborliness, back and forth.  It looks full of all possible pleasantness; like the cottage quarters of the army families, down at Fort Warren, that you see so white and pretty among the trees, as you go by in the steamboat.”

“Only they don’t make it out,” said Frank Sunderline, “after all.  The prettiest part of it is the going by in the steamboat.  Here, I mean.  The ‘Mother Goose’ idea is very suggestive; but if you went through that block, from beginning to end, I wonder how many ’bonny bowls’ you would really find, that you’d be willing to breakfast out of?”

“I wonder how many bonny bowls there’ll be, one of these days, in the cook’s closet of the grand house we’re going to?” said Ray.

“That’s it,” said Sunderline.  “It’s pretty to build, and it’s pretty to look at; but I should like to hear what your mother would say to the ‘conveniences.’  One convenience wants another to take care of it, till there’s such a compound interest of them that it takes a regiment just to man the pumps and pipes, and open and shut the cupboards.  Living doesn’t really need so much machinery.  But every household seems to want a little universe of its own, nowadays.”

“I suppose they make it wrong side out,” said Ray.  “I mean all outside.”

Further on, along the bay shores, and across the long bridge, and reaching over crests of hills that gave beautiful pictures of land and waterscape, the way was pleasanter and pleasanter.  Other and different homesteads were set along the route, suggesting endless imaginations of the different character and living of the dwellers.  More than once, either Ray or Frank was on the point of saying, as they passed some modest, pretty structure, with its field and garden-piece, its piazza, porch, or balcony, and its sunny windows,—­“There! that is a nice place and way to live!”

But a young man and woman are shy of sharing such imaginations, before the sharing is quite understood and openly promised.  So, many times a silence fell upon their casual talk, when the same thing was in the thought of each.

For miles before they came to it, the sightly Newrich edifice gave itself, in different aspects, to the view.  Mr. Newrich, himself, never saw anything else in his drives out, of sky, or hill, or water, after the first glimpse of “my house,” and the way it “showed up” in the approach.

Men were busy wheeling away rubbish, as they drove in between the great stone posts that marked the entrance, where the elegant, light-wrought, gilded iron gates were not yet hung.

Other laborers were rolling the lawn and terraces, newly sown with English grass seed that was to come up in the spring, and begin to weave its green velvet carpet.  Piles of bricks and boards were gathered at the back of the house and about the stables.