They live in a hamlet of
their own, known to the neighbors as the Little Gau.
Four large houses, whitewashed without and within, with
deep piazzas all around, the roofs of which join the
roofs of the houses themselves, and run up on all sides
to one point above the centre. In each house a hall some
twenty feet by fifty, and in the hall,--what is not in
the hall?--maybe a piano, maybe a fish-rod, maybe a rifle
or a telescope, a volume of sermons or a volume of songs,
a spinning-wheel, or a guitar, or a battledore. You
might ask widely for what you needed, for study or for
play, and you would find it, though it were a deep divan
of Osiat or a chibouque from Stamboul--you would find it
in one of these simple whitewashed halls.
Little Gau is so near the sea-shore that every day
they go down to the beach to bathe, and the beach is so
near the Gulf Stream that the swim is--well, perfection.
Still, the first day the ladies would not swim. They had
the trunks to open, they said, and the closets to
arrange. And the four men and the fourteen boys went to
that bath of baths alone. And as Felix, the cynic
grumbler, ran races naked on the beach with his boy
and the boy beat him, even Felix was heard to say, "How
little man needs here below to be perfectly happy!"
And at the Little Gau they spent the months from the
Fourth of July to the 13th of October--two great days in
history--getting ready for Mexico.
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