_Dear Kate_:
I am staying to-night at Lake Rest and it seems like home. I am a
setting in front of a fire of logs in a great big fire-place, and the
flicker of the fire and the ticking of the clock seem a sort of music to
me. Oh, Kate, it is wonderful here now! It is a little cold and the
hills around the Lake instead of being green, are all scarlet and brown.
The maple trees look as if they had put on their dancing dresses and the
beach turns to gold when the sun strikes it. The bitter-sweet has little
yellow berries which burst open and show the red centres, and the sumac
is all rouged standing stiff and straight as if waiting for the calcium
to be turned on it. The brown of the oak trees seem only made to show
off the green of the pines and hemlock and spruce, and the brakes that
was so green a month ago, are now all crisping up and dying along with
the golden rod and the purple astors. The ground is covered with a thick
brown carpet of oak leaves that rustle when you walk through them, as if
the fairies Mrs. Smith reads about, was trying to speak to you.
It rained yesterday when I come, sort of an unhappy rain that made
little ripples on the water and the Lake was covered with grey shadows
that said as plain as they could. "There is something deep and wonderful
below me here that I am covering up with my veil of mystery." I was
disappointed that I couldn't see the moon, but he broke out of the
clouds a while ago and touched their edges with silver. I am sure it
ain't the same sun and moon shining here that shines on city streets.
This morning I woke up early and from the ground to the sky there was
nothing but a sea of color. It looked as if the world was on fire over
there beyond the hills. It waved and rippled a great crimson thing
without a shadow, and then it changed to colors which I have never seen
before and I felt I was looking into a world of beauty that drawed the
heart right out of me. The sky above grew bluer and lighter with only
here and there a cloud till it was lost in a great cup that closed down
over the earth like a cap of silver.
Oh, Kate, I love it here, I wish I never had to go back. After I have
had a night here with the quiet and the peace that seems to be
everywhere, the restaurants, and the smoke and the people make me sick.
But after a couple of nights I slide back into it again, and like it, I
suppose because I have never knowed anything else. But I believe that if
I had a home like this I would never go to the city and rush around with
the women with tired faces and loud voices that seem to be trying to
hurry to finish something before they die. I sometimes set and listen to
women who seem to be so busy doing nothing, and when I hear them say, "I
am rushed to death" or "I haven't time to do a thing," I wonder what
would happen if they didn't do it. What is the difference anyway? If
they died to-morrow they wouldn't care it wasn't done, and if they don't
die, they will have time to do it, if it is the thing to be done.
I am tired of it all. Mrs. Smith says I have been working too hard and I
am blue because I am tired. Anyway I want to get way down in a big easy
chair and watch the fire and hear the wind in the trees and once in a
while, hear the acorns as they drop on the roof. That is all the music I
want. I never want to hear an orchestra, and I am sure that some day I
will put my foot through the big drum that keeps time for the dancing. I
wish you liked the country, Kate, and we could get a little place and
have a pig and some chickens and a duck and I wouldn't never have to see
a pavement or a street light.