The Two White Houses - Page 2

it."

Without a word they all pulled up, and for some minutes we sat silently
gazing at the house. Then the eldest of the three said that if he was a
rich man he would buy the house and pass the rest of his life very
happily in it and in the shade of its old trees.

In what, the others asked, would his happiness consist, since a
rational being must have something besides a mere shelter from the
storm and a tree to shade him from the sun to be happy?

He answered that after securing the house he would range the whole
country in search of the most beautiful woman in it, and that when he
had found and made her his wife he would spend his days and years in
adoring her for her beauty and charm.

His two young companions laughed scornfully. Then one of them--the
younger--said that he too if wealthy would buy the house, as he had not
seen another so well suited for the life he would like to live. A life
spent with books! He would send to Europe for all the books he desired
to read and would fill the house with them; and he would spend his days
in the house or in the shade of the trees, reading every day from
morning to night undisturbed by traffic and politics and revolutions in
the land, and by happenings all the world over.

He too was well laughed at; then the last of the three said he didn't
care for either of their ideals. He liked wine best, and if he had
great wealth he would buy the house and send to Europe--O not for books
nor for a beautiful wife! but for wine--wines of all the choicest kinds
in bottle and casks--and fill the cellars with it. And his choice wines
would bring choice spirits to help him drink them; and then in the
shade of the old trees they would have their table and sit over their
wine--the merriest, wittiest, wisest, most eloquent gathering in all
the land.

The others in their turn laughed at him, despising his ideal, and then
we set off once more.

They had not thought to put the question to me, because I was only a
boy while they were grown men; but I had listened with such intense
interest to that colloquy that when I recall the scene now I can see
the very expressions of their sun-burnt faces and listen to the very
sound of their speech and laughter. For they were all intimately known
to me and I knew they were telling openly just what their several
notions of a happy life were, caring nothing for the laughter of the
others. I was mightily pleased that they, too, had felt the attractions
of my Dovecot House as a place where a man, whatsoever his individual
taste, might find a happy abiding-place.

Time rolled on, as the slow-going old storybooks written before we were
born used to say, and I still preserved the old habit of pulling