masses of that little wild-flower which grew close about its doors, and over the fireplace were inscribed as a motto Wordsworth’s well- known lines:
There ’s such a place as Yarrow.”
It was a rambling, rustic home, unpretentious enough—for simplicity was always one of Mrs.
“Yarrow” cottage, Mrs. Dodge’s summer home at Onteora, New York.
Dodge’s chosen virtues, and simplicity reigned without and within. But she loved the cozy rooms with their quaint corners, the fire upon the hearth, and the view, from the veranda, of the green, wooded slopes and the towering blue hills beyond. Here she dwelt, summer after summer, in sweet content; in love with Nature and her little home, and yet more in love with her fellow-colonists—many of them dear and old-time friends whose cottages neighbored her own or made delightful Meccas for her in her drives about the mountain.
Yor Onteora had cast its spell, not only upon writers, but upon leading artists, players, and men of the first rank in their professions, who had found themselves lured to congenial association within its leafy byways. Thus, during one or another happy summer, the veranda of “Yarrow” echoed to merry laughter when Mark Twain, Laurence Hutton, Rev. Dr. R. Heber Newton, Carroll Beckwith, or Brander Matthews—fellow-cottagers all—dropped in, with jest or story, and found their own wits sharpened ere they left. Jere, too, it was a joy to see Mrs. Dodge’s unconscious pride in her elder son, James Mapes Dodge, who, not content with carrying the family genius for inven-