Page:An orchard princess (IA orchardprincess00barbiala).pdf/39



Maple Green begins at Hunter Brough's studio and ends at the Maple Tree Inn, a quarter of a mile away. In point of fact, it is only a string of summer studios lining one side of a well-kept country road in the Connecticut hills. On the other side lie fields and orchards, squared and quadrangled by stone walls, and curving concavely upward and away into a green ridge. Here and there, always at the end of a narrow lane leading from the highway, a farmhouse peers tranquilly forth upon the little studios from a nest of trees, like a dignified mother hen keeping a watchful eye upon a brood of flighty chickens.

And to the square-cornered, rigidly proper farm-houses those studios must look flighty enough. Such strange roofs, dipping and slanting in