Whenever Harrington urges me to go to live in the country, his place is only forty-three minutes from City Hall. But when he asked me last week to spend Saturday afternoon with him, he told me that some trains are slower than others and that I had better allow ten minutes for the ferry. I have never known a commuter who told the truth about the time it takes him to cover the distance from his office-door to his front lawn. If he is exceptionally conscientious he will take into account the preliminary ride on the Subway and possibly even the walk from his office to the Subway station. But no commuter ever alludes to the fifteen minutes' walk at the other end. I did know one man who never under-estimated the length of his daily trips, but he was a cynic who hated the country and lived there because his wife's mother owned the house, and he multiplied by two the time it really took him to get into town. The exact truth I have never had.

As a matter of fact, sitting there in a rather stuffy car which made its way through much unlovely landscape, I reflected that there are really three different schedules on which suburban traffic is conducted. One is the time it takes a commuter's friends to come out to see him. Another is the time he claims it takes him to come into town every day. The third, and incomparably the shortest of the three, is the time your friend says it will take him to come into town after the completion of some very extensive railway improvements which, in practice, I have found are never completed. I am quite aware that great bridges have been built, and that railway tunnels have been opened into Long Island and other railway tunnels into New Jersey, and that steam is being rapidly replaced by electricity. But it is my firm belief that such of my suburban friends as live within the zone affected by these improvements will move away before the change for the better actually comes. I am no pessimist. I base this expectation on the simple fact that every commuter I know, for as long a period as I have known him, has been looking forward to the completion of railway improvements involving the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars. The march of progress apparently finds the suburban resident always a little in advance.

Harrington met me at the station and asked me if that was not a very good train I had come down on. The suburban virus was in me. I lied and said yes. As we sat at our luncheon I felt how peculiarly a vital factor in out-of-town existence the railroad constitutes. Both Harrington and his wife spoke of trains as of living, breathing people. Some trains, with all their faults, the Harringtons evidently loved. Others they detested, and made no attempt to conceal the fact. I had just finished telling Mrs. Harrington about the latest woman's suffrage parade when Harrington said: "Do you know, my dear, the 8.13 is getting worse all the time." I was still thinking of my own story, and I failed to catch just who or what it was that was getting worse all the time to an extent so inimical to Harrington's peace of mind. But Mrs. Harrington looked up, frowning slightly, and said: "Can't anything be done?" Harrington shook his head. "It's hopeless." By this time I was convinced that it must be some family skeleton that Harrington had rather oddly chosen to bring out before a stranger; some scapegrace cousin, I suspected, who probably got drunk and came to Harrington's office and demanded money. I looked discreetly into my plate as Mrs. Harrington suggested: "You might write to the superintendent." "We have," replied Harrington, "and he threatened to take it off altogether. Not that it would mean any loss. I can make just as good time now by the 8:35."

After luncheon we walked. I have never found the walking in the suburbs very good. There is a regrettable lack of elbow-room. A short stroll brings one either to a railway-siding, which is bad enough, or to a promising growth of trees, which is worse. From the road these trees look like the beginning of a primeval jungle sweeping on to far horizons. Plunge into that timber growth and in five minutes you emerge on a sewered road with concrete sidewalks and ornamental lamp posts and a crew of Italian labourers drinking beer in the shadow of a steam-roller. It is a gash of civilisation across the face of the wilderness, and, like most deformities, it is displeasing to the eye. Walking under such conditions is not stimulative. I miss the sense of space and freedom I get in the streets of New York, where I know that I can walk twenty miles north or twenty miles east without interference or inconvenience. Give me either a mountain-top or Broadway. Suburban vistas are pitifully cramped.

That day it had rained, and I should have been additionally glad to stay indoors. But Mrs. Harrington is a fervent naturalist, and she insisted on taking me out to look at the wild flowers and listen to the bird-calls. Both of these branches of nature-study, I am convinced, call for an intensity of sympathetic imagination that I am incapable of developing; and especially the bird-calls. Concerning the latter, I feel sure that a great deal of humbug is being said and written. I mean to cast no reflections upon Harrington or his wife. The only occasions on which I have known Harrington to deviate from the truth have been, as I have already pointed out, in connection with his train-schedules. And as Mrs. Harrington does not travel to the city, even this charge will not hold against her. And yet I cannot help feeling that neither of the two really hears the catbird say "miaow" or the robin "cheer up," as they pretend to. At the first twitter or chirp from some invisible source Mrs. Harrington stops and with radiant face asks me whether I do not distinctly catch the "pit-pit-pity-me" of the meadow-lark. I say yes; but I really don't, and I don't believe she does. My explanation is that Mrs. Harrington is a woman and consequently ready to hear what she has been led to expect she would hear. As for Harrington, he is a devoted husband.

For let us look at the matter with an open mind. Our alphabetical representations of animal sounds are at best only rough approximations. Most often they are not even that. They are mere arbitrary symbols. We use consonants where the bird uses none, as when we give the name cuckoo to a bird whose cry is really "ooh, ooh." Or else we put in the wrong consonants, which is shown by the fact that different nations assign different consonantal sounds to the same bird. We do not even agree on the vowel sounds. What is there in common between our English "Cock-a-doodle-doo" and M. Rostand's "cocorico"? And we need not go as far as the animal world. See how the nations differ in spelling out that elementary human sound which is the expression of pain or surprise, and which in this country we hear as "Oh," and the Germans hear as "Ach," and the Greeks heard as "Ai, Ai." If the human vocal chords can be so imperfectly imitated, what shall we say of birds speaking after a manner all their own? For myself I confess that in congenial company I can hear birds say anything, but that left to myself I am sometimes puzzled by a parrot. And that is the reason why I am sceptical concerning Mrs. Harrington's accomplishments in this field.

But while the birds about the Harringtons' home simply offend my regard for the truth, the Harringtons' dog causes me acute bodily and mental discomfort. He is of a spotted white, with a disreputable black patch over one eye, and weighs, I should imagine, between eighty and ninety pounds. During luncheon he takes his place under the table, and from there emits blood-curdling howls with sufficient frequency to make conversation extremely difficult. This he varies by nosing about the visitor's legs and growling. I am not fond of dogs under the best of circumstances. I always labour under the presumption that they will bite. Their habit of suddenly dashing across the floor, in furious pursuit of nothing in particular, upsets me. But an invisible dog under a dining-room table is a dreadful experience. It is true that I managed to give Mrs. Harrington a fairly rational account of the woman's suffrage parade. But was she aware, as I sat there smiling spasmodically, what agonies of fear were mine as I waited for those white fangs under the table to sink into my flesh? If, under the circumstances, I confused Harriet Beecher Stowe with Julia Ward Howe, and made a bad blunder about woman's rights in Finland, am I so very much to blame?

Not that the Harringtons are the worst offenders in this respect. There is an old classmate, and a very dear friend, indeed, who lives on Flushing Bay, and has a pair of hopelessly ferocious dogs that hold the neighbourhood in terror. The only occasion on which they have been known to show indifference to strangers was one night when burglars broke in and stole some silver and a revolver. When I go out to Flushing, I stipulate that the dogs shall be locked up in the cellar from ten minutes before my train is due until ten minutes after I have left the house. But it would be foolhardy to omit additional precautions. Hence I always carry an umbrella with the ferrule sharpened to a point, and when I am within a block of the house I stoop and pick up a large stone, and go on my way, with all my senses acute, whistling cheerfully. It is odd how people will put themselves out to keep a harmless, poor relation out of the way of visitors, and never think of the much greater discomfort attendant upon the constant presence of an active bull-terrier.

I may have produced the impression that life in the country makes no appeal to me. Nothing could be further from my intentions. Whatever doubts I may have entertained on this point vanish completely as the Harringtons escort me to the station in the cool of the evening, the dog having been left at home at my request. We pass by low, white-pillared houses behind hedges, and the scent of hay comes up from the lawns, and laughter comes from the dark of the verandas. The city at such a time seems a very undesirable place to return to; a place to lose one's self in—yes, and that is all. The Harringtons never were in the city what they are here. They have taken root, they have developed local pride which is only the sense of home. As we walk they point out the residences of the leading citizens. Here lives the owner of one of the largest factories of mechanical pianos in the country. This Japanese temple belongs to a man who writes for some of the best-known magazines. That colonial dwelling is occupied by the lawyer who defended Mrs. Dower when she was tried for poisoning her husband. I reflect, in genuine humility, that in the city I never think of taking strangers to see Mr. William Dean Howells's house or Mr. Joseph H. Choate's. And with real regret and admiration, I say good-night to the Harringtons.