It would be necessary for me to be away
all day,--and we could not afford to keep a man,--so we must be
careful to get a house somewhere off the line of ordinary travel,
or else in a well-settled neighborhood, where there would be some
one near at hand in case of unruly visitors.
"A village I don't like," said Euphemia: "there is always so much
gossip, and people know all about what you have, and what you do.
And yet it would be very lonely, and perhaps dangerous, for us to
live off somewhere, all by ourselves. And there is another
objection to a village. We don't want a house with a small yard
and a garden at the back. We ought to have a dear little farm,
with some fields for corn, and a cow, and a barn and things of that
sort. All that would be lovely. I'll tell you what we want," she
cried, seized with a sudden inspiration; "we ought to try to get
the end-house of a village. Then our house could be near the
neighbors, and our farm could stretch out a little way into the
country beyond us. Let us fix our minds upon such a house and I
believe we can get it."
So we fixed our minds, but in the course of a week or two we
unfixed them several times to allow the consideration of places,
which otherwise would have been out of range; and during one of
these intervals of mental disfixment we took a house.
It was not the end-house of a village, but it was in the outskirts
of a very small rural settlement. Our nearest neighbor was within
vigorous shouting distance, and the house suited us so well in
other respects, that we concluded that this would do.
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