Love’s Way in Arcadia

Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863-1935) was an English journalist and author. He wrote more than 230 books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and non-fiction, and was one of the most prolific English writers of detective fiction.

Fletcher’s story Love’s Way in Arcadia, which we propose to our readers today, was published in June 1911 in the Ainslee's magazine.

«Sweetbriar farm when I went to stay there that summer, seemed to me a crystallization of all the storied sweets of Arcadia as one reads of them in the poets and the dreamers. The house itself was some five hundred years old; it had diamond-paned windows framed in ivy; on one side where there was no ivy the gray walls were covered with clematis, and honeysuckle, and jessamine. There was a walled garden, gay with blossom; there was an orchard where the blossom fell on lush grass in which golden daffodils sprang up. At the end of the orchard ran a stream, brown and mysterious, in whose deeper pools lurked speckled trout...».