We were given the values and disadvantages of the East shore and also of the West shore, the town between.... Somehow we always turn to the East in our best moments and it was so this day.... We were directed to the house of a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He was not well that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages. That boy you shall be glad to know.
We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He would have been strange, indeed, had she failed.... I look back now from where I sit--to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to the very edge of a willowed bluff--to the end of the land. Erie brimmed before us. It led to a new life, too.
I had always disliked Erie--as one who lived in the Lake Country and chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie heretofore had meant only something to be crossed--something shallow and petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to wait. We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars from this vantage.... If a man built his house here, he could explain where he lived by the nearest map in a Japanese house, or in a Russian peasant's house, for Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the Inland Sea is to us. I had heard Japanese children repeat the names of the Great Lakes. When you come to a shore like this you are at the end of the landscape. You must pause. Somehow I think--we are pausing still. One must pause to project a dream.
... For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we hardly ventured to speak of it. We had expected so little, and had brought such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of life, and the small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the cosmic answer. All that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern heavens; and I shall never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the first swarm of bees. They had to be carried on a branch down a deep gulley, and several hundred feet beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cluster were in the air about me, before the super was lifted. Yet there was not a sting from the tens of thousands. We had the true thirst that year. Little things were enough; we were innocent, even of possession, and brought back to the good land all the sensitizing that the City had given. There were days in which we were so happy--that another summer of such life would have seemed too much to ask.