After breakfast I write letters. Before I know it Amelie appears at the
library door to announce that "Madame est servie"--and the morning is
gone. As I am alone, as a rule I take my lunch in the breakfast-room.
It is on the north side of the house, and is the coolest room in the
house at noon. Besides, it has a window overlooking the plain. In the
afternoon I read and write and mend, and then I take a light supper in
the arbor on the east side of the house under a crimson rambler, one of
the first ever planted here over thirty years ago.
I must tell you about that crimson rambler. You know when I hired this
house it was only a peasant's hut. In front of what is now the
kitchen--it was then a dark hole for fuel--stood four dilapidated posts,
moss-covered and decrepit, over which hung a tangle of something. It
was what I called a "mess." I was not as educated as I am now. I
saw--it was winter--what looked to me an unsightly tangle of disorder.
I ordered those posts down. My workmen, who stood in some awe of me,--I
was the first American they had ever seen,--were slow in obeying. They
did not dispute the order, only they did not execute it.
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