At that period she
appears to have struck a trail to the Happy Hunting Grounds. I quote
from the local historiographer.
Whether they were developing a kitchen garden, or emulating Professor
Schliemann, at Mycenae, the newcomers were evidently persons of refined
musical taste: the lady had a contralto voice of remarkable sweetness,
although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a morning by
the high gate and listen to her executing an arietta, conjecturally at
some window upstairs, for the house was not visible from the turnpike.
The husband, somewhere about the ground, would occasionally respond with
two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal, Arcadian business. They
seemed very happy together, these two persons, who asked no odds
whatever of the community in which they had settled themselves.
There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this couple which I
admit piqued my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid interest in
the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like a pair of lovers who had
run off and got married clandestinely. I willingly acquitted them,
however, of having done anything unlawful; for, to change a word in the
lines of the poet,
"It is a joy to _think_ the best
We may of human kind."
Admitting the hypothesis of elopement, there was no mystery in their
neither sending nor receiving letters.
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