Sincerely, Willis Wayde Read Free

window turned up again, and Willis and Patrick were alone.
    â€œIt’s an awful hot day, isn’t it?” Willis said. “But it’s hotter still in Kansas.”
    â€œDon’t talk when I’m driving,” Mr. Flynn said.
    It was all like a foreign country. The street was lined with old-fashioned homes, all neatly painted and pretty close together. The trees were what impressed Willis most. He had seen elms before but never so many big ones looking like green feather dusters, and not a leaf of them was stirring. Outside of town they passed a few small farms in a mean-looking rocky country with fields bordered by stone walls. Then the road ran along the river for a piece, and all at once he saw a group of brick buildings and a tall factory chimney. There was a high wire fence all around them and a row of workers’ houses on the other side of the road. They turned left near the factory and began climbing a steepish hill, and a minute later Willis saw the dressed-granite wall that marked the front of the Harcourt place.
    When the Harcourt family, like other New England millowners, had become suddenly rich during the Civil War, William Harcourt, Mr. Henry Harcourt’s grandfather, had built the Harcourt place. Though the war had added to the family fortune, the Harcourts were already well-to-do. In 1819 William Harcourt had married a Miss Rebecca Atwood, the only daughter of a Boston shipping family, and he had also inherited a substantial legacy from an English cousin. Furthermore he was gifted with sound business instincts that prompted him to build a cotton manufactory in 1850 upon the river frontage of what was then the old Harcourt farm.
    William Harcourt had been an old man when he built the Harcourt place—not so much for his own enjoyment as from some vague desire for dynastic security. While on a business trip to England, he retained the services of a British architect, an Oswell Beardsley, whose specialty was country houses, and consequently the Harcourt place always had a slightly foreign flavor. This Mr. Beardsley selected for his site a knoll in almost the center of the old farm acreage that overlooked the mill buildings and the river; and, arbitrarily, he cut off a tract of about fifteen acres of forest and orchard and pasture, surrounding it by a low wall. It was Beardsley who decided which old trees would remain and who supervised all the planting of the new trees and shrubbery that shielded the house and outbuildings. Though the place was walled off from the farm proper, very consciously excluding the old farmhouse and cattle barns, the imported architect had considered all the three hundred acres of the old farm and the mill itself as a single unit, and the granite house he built—with its Gothic windows and Gothic verandas, with its stables and greenhouse, and walled gardens for flowers and vegetables—became the central adornment of the whole.
    This vision had been somewhat altered when the land around the mill grew eventually into a small village and more foremen’s and superintendents’ houses were constructed. Yet anyone who faced the main entrance in the low granite wall and saw the stone gate cottage and the mansard roof and gables of the big house through the trees still understood that the Harcourt place owed its existence to the functional structures by the river. The wisteria vines on the porches and the growth of the trees had softened harder outlines. When Willis first saw the Harcourt place some sixty years had passed over it, and it had begun to have its own atmosphere.
    When the Locomobile turned into the drive, the limbs of the beech trees that bordered it made a network of shadow over the freshly raked yellow gravel. Between their pale-gray trunks Willis saw the mowed green fields on either side, with a sheepfold in one space and then a duck pond and a summerhouse. It was quite a while before they came to the lawns and the terraced gardens. From