' U8RARY * 
 
 1 
 
 UNIVtRSlTV Of 
 CALUOHWIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 L
 
 [See page 167 
 NO HOUSE WHICH DID NOT STAND IN A GROUP OF TREES
 
 BY 
 W. C. PRIME, LL.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "i GO A-FISHING" ETC. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 HARPER Sf BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 NO HOUSE WHICH DID NOT STAND IN A GROUP 
 
 OF TREES Frontispiece 
 
 THE CHURCH-BELL ANNOUNCES "EVENING 
 
 MEETING" Facinep. 22 
 
 A MOUNTAIN ROAD " 86 
 
 ON THE PROFILE ROAD " 124
 
 PREFACE 
 
 DROBABLY no one ever made a book for the reason 
 which induces the making of this. The papers here 
 gathered were written, as letters, to a daily newspaper, 
 the New York Journal of Commerce, in the course of a cor- 
 respondence which has extended over more than forty 
 years. Although often asked to gather them in a book, 
 my judgment has been that such letters, however read- 
 able or unreadable when occasionally appearing in one's 
 morning newspaper, are not good material for continuous 
 reading in a solid book. They were written for the pur- 
 pose of a day, served their purpose, disappeared, and I 
 had no wish to recall them. But they had been cut out 
 and preserved by more than one person, strangers to me, 
 who have severally written me that if I do not make a 
 book of them they will ! Should such a book be made 
 by another person, it would perpetuate many sad errors 
 of type, such as occur in rapid newspaper work, and be 
 a misfortune to the papers and to me. There was but 
 one way to protect the dead and long-buried sketches 
 namely, to select some of them, revise, correct, and edit 
 them, and make a book, which I have done only because 
 I did not want it made.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PACK 
 
 I. ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS I 
 
 II. IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 17 
 
 III. A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 34 
 
 IV. UPHILL IN FOG 41 
 
 V. SWEET-SCENTED FERN 45 
 
 VI. AN ANGLER'S AUGUST DAY 54 
 
 VII. VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 63 
 
 VIII. HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW HAMPSHIRE . 70 
 
 IX. THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 77 
 
 X. A DEAD LETTER 85 
 
 XI. EPITAPHS AND NAMES 97 
 
 XII. FINDING NEW COUNTRY 124 
 
 XIII. BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS 136 
 
 XIV. PILGRIMAGE ENDED 143 
 
 XV. NON-RESISTANCE I$2 
 
 XVI. SONGS OF THE AGES l6o 
 
 XVII. IGNOTUS 167 
 
 XVIII. SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 175 
 
 XIX. A WINTER NIGHT'S ERRAND 183 
 
 XX. HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL IQO
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 THE carriage was standing at the door, and I 
 had finished my morning inspection of horses, 
 harness, bolts, and gearing. We were on one of 
 our favorite journeys, wandering over the hills and 
 through the valleys of New Hampshire and Ver- 
 mont. We had driven already two or three hun- 
 dred miles, seeking only that which we found daily, 
 scenery, sunshine, birds, flowers, whatever of nat- 
 ure and whatever of humanity might be seen as 
 we wandered along New England roads. 
 
 A gentleman who was standing in the hotel door- 
 way said "I am told you travel a great deal with 
 horses and carriage. It puzzles me to know what 
 pleasure you find in it. I have travelled in that 
 way in Europe, but I don't understand what at- 
 tractions you find in New England." 
 
 He expressed the idea which is in many minds. 
 I could not afford to waste the morning in recount- 
 ing to him the delights of carriage journeying. I 
 gave him but a brief summary of these, told him
 
 2 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 there was no country in the world which was so 
 charming to the traveller as this country, nor one 
 in which scenery was more varied and beautiful, 
 nor one in which country inns were so good, country 
 people so hospitable, and finished by saying : " Try 
 it for yourself, and if you don't enjoy it don't do it 
 again." 
 
 The road was in that charming country which 
 lies south of the White Mountain range. We had 
 followed the Pemigewasset River from its source 
 in Profile Lake, under the Old Man of the Mount- 
 ain, day after day, until we had left it at Franklin 
 Falls, and were now following our varying whims 
 from valley to valley, over highlands and hills, 
 through the very heart of the Granite State. 
 
 It was in May. The forests farther north had 
 been just tinged with that delicious mauve color 
 which is caused by the swelling buds of the ma- 
 ples, and which from day to day changes into pink 
 and hazy sky blue and at length, when the buds 
 burst, into green. But here the green had won the 
 day, and the view in all directions, as I drove 
 along, was fresh and full of promise. When the 
 road led through forest both sides were luxuriant 
 with the close -packed masses of ferns just com- 
 mencing summer life, and in the woods were hosts 
 of purple and striped blossoms of the trilium, the 
 glory of our northern forests in the early season. 
 I came out from a piece of woods on a plain where
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 3 
 
 the road went straight ahead in full view for a 
 half-mile. Nearly that distance ahead stood a 
 farm-house, with its barns and out-buildings. The 
 house stood back from the road among fruit-trees, 
 some of which were in blossom. But what espe- 
 cially attracted attention was a large number of 
 horses and wagons, vehicles of various descriptions, 
 which made the front yard and the road near the 
 house look black. 
 
 Only two events in the country life are likely to 
 cause such a gathering around a house. When 
 you see it you are quite safe in thinking that there 
 is a funeral or an auction sale. Either is sure to 
 bring together all the wagons of a very wide-spread 
 population. There is this difference, however, that 
 to the funeral men and women and children come, 
 but to the " vandue " only men. 
 
 As I approached the house I began to pass 
 horses tied to fences and small trees. Everything 
 in the shape of a hitching - post, everything to 
 which a halter could be tied, was in use, and when 
 I reached the front gate there were groups of men 
 so occupied here and there that no doubt could 
 exist that this was an auction sale. It was un- 
 doubtedly a funeral in one sense, not of any one 
 dead, but of a home. It was the extinguishment 
 of a fire that had been burning on a hearth a great 
 many years. It took but a little while to learn 
 from those who were grouped near the gate the rea-
 
 4 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 sons for the auction. This group consisted of men 
 who had come only because it was an occasion for 
 meeting people, a chance for general talk and ex- 
 change of little news, a break in the monotony 
 of country life. Near the barn was another group, 
 inspecting cows. They had no interest in the sale 
 of furniture in the house. On the front lawn was 
 another group. I fancied they were discussing the 
 value of the farm, whether it was worth the mort- 
 gage on it, whether any one was likely to bid on 
 it. As I walked in towards the door I saw that 
 there were people in all parts of the house, most 
 of them in the large kitchen whence the voice of 
 the auctioneer was audible. As I entered he was 
 selling cooking utensils, getting from a cent to six 
 cents apiece, rarely as much as ten cents for any 
 article. 
 
 I confess that, as I looked around this kitchen 
 on this scene, I felt very much as if it were a fu- 
 neral, and began to think that I had an interest in, 
 a personal acquaintance with the departed. It 
 had been for a long lifetime the home of an honest, 
 respected farmer, who had recently died; an old 
 man whose work was ended. His children, all but 
 one daughter, had gone to distant parts of the 
 country. His wife had died a year before. The 
 property must be sold to settle his small estate, 
 pay his funeral expenses and perhaps other claims. 
 There was to be also an attempt to find a pur-
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 5 
 
 chaser for the farm, but it was thought the holder 
 of a mortgage on it would be the only possible 
 bidder. 
 
 That life was to be closed out forever. Where- 
 in much of it had consisted was here visible. It 
 was displayed for public view, and any stranger was 
 free to rove from room to room and see the record , 
 for nothing was reserved; not even the clothing, 
 or the old man's silver watch, or his wife's work- 
 basket with knitting needles and scissors, and a 
 knife with a broken blade, and a ball of blue yarn 
 and a half-knit woollen stocking. 
 
 Here was a summing up of the total reward in 
 this world's valuables which a long, laborious life 
 had earned. I can never cease to feel indignation 
 at the preachers about labor and its rewards who 
 imagine that workmen in the trades are the only 
 laborers to be considered ; who are deceived by 
 the idea that the various societies of " working- 
 men" represent one -tenth of the hard-working 
 men of our country; who imagine that the labor 
 question relates only to that small number of per- 
 sons who work for fixed pay, eight or ten hours a 
 day. 
 
 The life of this man from his childhood had been 
 one of incessant labor, hard work, beginning daily 
 long before daylight, ending so wearily after dark 
 that he welcomed sleep as the only rest he knew. 
 Your ten - hour city laborer does not know what
 
 6 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 work means, and never will know till he acquires a 
 farm and has to support life by digging for himself, 
 paying himself for his work, and finding that to 
 the vast body of American farmers fourteen hours 
 a day labor earns bare subsistence. 
 
 The life labor in this house and on this farm 
 showed in the end, as the laborer's pay when all 
 work was done, just nothing beyond the bare sup- 
 port of the life. Less, indeed, than that, for there 
 was a mortgage on the farm, which represented a 
 demand of some pressing need, or a steady, slow 
 falling behind from year to year. 
 
 The home furniture was not luxurious ; far oth- 
 erwise. But it was not altogether without interest. 
 There was an old chest of drawers in one room 
 which probably belonged to the mother, possibly 
 came from her mother when she was married. It 
 was made of solid cherry-wood, and the old brass 
 mountings were, for a wonder, brilliant as if new. 
 There was a small looking-glass hanging on a wall, 
 in a frame once of great beauty, the relief orna- 
 ments on it being ears of golden grain. There 
 were some pictures in black-pine frames, without 
 glass. None had any money value, but each had 
 higher than money value, because they had been 
 the delights of that family life. Children had 
 grown up looking at them daily, their young imag- 
 inations wandering far away under the guiding in- 
 fluence of art. Mark you, my friend, art brings its
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 7 
 
 blessings not alone by the power of renowned art- 
 ists, by the works of great masters. There are very 
 rude pictures, pictures which provoke the derision 
 of ignorant critics, pictures which have had mighty 
 influence in swaying human minds. There was a 
 fifteenth - century artist in Cologne whose Bible 
 pictures in rough hard outlines were the educators 
 of millions of people for a century and more after 
 he was dead. It is the thought written in the pict- 
 ure which is its power, not the execution, which is 
 of account to very few who see it. There is no 
 possible doubt that that old painted print of Ruth 
 gleaning, and that other of the raising of the wid- 
 ow's son of Nain, had impressed lessons on young 
 minds not to be effaced in this world's experiences, 
 perhaps not in any other world. 
 
 The old kitchen seemed to be the place wherein 
 the life had left its strongest marks. And yet they 
 were not many. There was a little printed calen- 
 dar of a year long ago pasted on the side of the 
 chimney. There was a clock (not worth your pur- 
 chasing, my friend) standing high up on a wooden 
 shelf. There was a dresser whereon the family 
 crockery was piled for sale. Having in mind 
 friends who want old crockery, I looked over the 
 pieces, one by one, but found nothing worth a 
 stranger's purchasing, except, perhaps, one English 
 plate with a blue print, the rich dark blue wherein 
 the cheap Staffordshire wares surpassed all other,
 
 8 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 Oriental or Occidental, potteries or porcelains. But 
 the table was there, a very old square table, made 
 of black-ash, with four solid legs. It had no claim 
 to notice for any beauty about it. But around it 
 the family had been gathered morning, noon, and 
 evening. First the young man and his young wife 
 had sat there alone, happy, hopeful. Years had 
 fulfilled all they had hoped for, had brought little 
 heads to the sides of the table, and years had 
 changed them into older and perhaps wiser heads. 
 All the troubles and all the happiness of every one 
 of them had been brought to the assemblies at that 
 kitchen table. Christmases, Thanksgiving days, 
 wedding-days of daughters, days when the minister 
 was to make his annual visit, all the gala-days of 
 life had loaded the table with unusual feasts. And 
 always with unfailing humility and gratitude, the 
 voice of the father had been heard at the head of 
 the board thanking God as sincerely as if the farm 
 had been a gold-mine instead of slow -yielding 
 soil. 
 
 I was in the house but a few minutes. As I 
 drove rapidly down the road I overtook a man, 
 going home from the sale. I am not fond of "buy- 
 ing bargains " in such cases. If there had been 
 anything to tempt me I could not comfortably own 
 a purchase out of that household at the poor prices 
 things were bringing. But this man was carrying 
 home something. As I turned out and drove by
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 9 
 
 him he held it up for me to see. We went along 
 side by side. 
 
 " What have you got there ?" 
 
 " I don't know. I think it's an old pitcher they 
 used in a church." 
 
 " What did you buy it for ?" 
 
 " I don't know. I s'pose I can sell it to some 
 one." 
 
 " How much do you want for it ?" 
 
 " I don't know what it's worth." 
 
 "Well, speak quick, if you want to sell," and my 
 horses were pulling ahead hard. 
 
 " I don't know as I care to sell it." 
 
 " All right," and I went ahead rapidly. 
 
 " Will you give two dollars ?" came in a shout 
 after me. 
 
 " Will you take it ?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 He came up alongside of me and I took my pur- 
 chase. It was never church property ; quite other- 
 wise. It was a fine, tall, old two-quart pewter mug 
 with cover. It had done duty in times Vhen men 
 sat together while the pewter, filled with foaming 
 beer, went around from hand to hand and lip to 
 lip. It was in perfect order, but there was nothing 
 about it which seemed in keeping with the old 
 farm-house. When, four miles on, I stopped to 
 feed my horses, the landlord, looking in my car- 
 riage, exclaimed, " Hello, did you buy Jake's pewter
 
 to 
 
 pitcher ?" and then said Jake had bought it at an- 
 other sale years ago, on speculation, and had car- 
 ried it afterwards to every " vandue," trying to find 
 a purchaser. 
 
 In the autumn of that year I drove again through 
 the same country, sometimes on the same, mostly 
 on other roads. The aspect of the hills and val- 
 leys was now very different. October is a golden 
 month for carriage travel, on some accounts more 
 pleasant than any other month in the year, both 
 for horses and travellers. 
 
 The road passed through a forest, unbroken for 
 half a mile. On the right a stream wandered over 
 rocks, and under little bluffs of moss, bright green 
 miniature copies of mountain bluffs along the 
 courses of mighty rivers. Now and then, where 
 the stream fell into a pool, the lower end of the 
 pool was dammed with autumn leaves, yellow and 
 red and brown, and in the whirl of the pool you 
 could see the same colored leaves going around 
 and around, and the water looked as if it were 
 clearer and colder for their presence. The road 
 was covered over with leaves, a yellow carpet, and 
 every few minutes the light breeze would freshen 
 up a little and shake the higher branches of the 
 trees, and send down a shower of leaves, which 
 flitted and darted to and fro, flashing in the sun- 
 shine, and falling on our laps and all around us. 
 
 At length the road, which going up a gentle as-
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS II 
 
 cent left the brook away in the woods, emerged 
 into open country, and we found ourselves on the 
 top of a hill. Before us spread one of those beau- 
 tiful landscapes in which New England is richer 
 than any other part of the world that I know of. 
 The road descended into an oval basin, some three 
 miles long and a mile broad, the bottom and sides 
 of which were, or had been, cultivated farm lands, 
 except where a small lake slept motionless. It was 
 surrounded by low hills, up the sides of which the 
 fields extended, here and there one of them glow- 
 ing with the buff and gold of corn stubble and 
 scattered pumpkins. Along the ridges, where the 
 fields did not go over them, were groves of maple 
 and birch whose autumn colors were intensely 
 bright, while down the slopes lay many abandoned 
 fields gone to brush, mauve, maroon, crimson, and 
 purple-colored with their dense growth of bushes, 
 scarlet-lined along the fences by rows of sumac. 
 
 If you can show me anywhere in the world land- 
 scapes which are as rich and varied in color as our 
 northern landscapes in America, or which are more 
 beautiful in the form and contrast of valley and 
 hill, I will go far with you to see them. Autumnal 
 foliage with many is thought to be the changed 
 color of the forest leaves, and few have observed 
 the wonderful painting of landscapes in the autum- 
 nal colors of the low bushes. Many of our New 
 England rivers in October flow between banks
 
 12 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 and around low gravel islands which are un- 
 broken masses of crimson from a plant not a 
 foot high, covering every inch for acres. And 
 the shades are even more beautiful than the in- 
 tense colors, soft, rich, and delicate as old em- 
 broideries. 
 
 There was no village in the valley. As I drove 
 along the road which led nearly through the mid- 
 dle of it I came, at a cross-road, to a graveyard 
 and an old church. That it was once a church the 
 remains of a tower or spire indicated, and its lo- 
 cation, a hundred feet from both roads, in the 
 graveyard, demonstrated. There had never been 
 any fence around the lot except the rough -laid 
 loose stone-wall which serves for fence in all parts 
 of our country where stone is plenty. And no 
 better or more picturesque fencing can be, espe- 
 cially if people will plant along such walls any of 
 the many beautiful vines which abound everywhere, 
 and thrive luxuriantly in just such places. But no 
 vines had ever been planted here. Not a solitary 
 bush or tree grew in the graveyard. Even grass 
 seemed to have run out from lonesomeness and 
 neglect, so that the ground looked like an old 
 worn-out pasture lot, the only break in the desolate 
 aspect being a stunted sprig of golden-rod which 
 gleamed in front of the church door. 
 
 I passed it, careful not to tread on it, and tried 
 the door, found it open, and went in. The interior
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 13 
 
 was a sad ruin, through which the breeze was free 
 to blow, for there was no glass in any window, nor, 
 indeed, now any need of glass, since it was plain 
 enough that there had not been for long time any 
 assembling of people here to worship. The pul- 
 pit, nearly round and high up, backed by a large 
 window, had once been reached by a winding stair- 
 way, now broken down. The pews, which were 
 built of pine, without paint, were in fair preserva- 
 tion. The plaster on the walls and flat ceiling had 
 mostly fallen off, and lay in the pews and on the 
 floor of the aisles. I could see the blue sky 
 through one great rift overhead where the roof 
 timber had fallen in and crushed down the ceil- 
 ing. 
 
 No places are filled with such profound interest 
 to thoughtful men as those spots in which their 
 fellow-men of former generations were accustomed 
 to assemble for the worship of God. And places 
 of Christian worship are more deeply interesting 
 because of the characteristics of that worship 
 which distinguish it from all others. In no other 
 have men approached Deity with the sense of per- 
 sonal unworthiness which only their God can re- 
 move, and with faith in His fatherhood and broth- 
 erhood, His personal presence among them, and 
 His love for them. From the early ages of the 
 Christian Church this immediate and close rela- 
 tionship between God and man has been a distin-
 
 14 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 guishing characteristic of old Christian art, whose 
 earliest representations of His personality are as 
 the Good Shepherd, carrying home a lost and 
 found lamb of His flock. If that faith which di- 
 rects their prayers be indeed the substance of the 
 things hoped for, then the place where men meet 
 their God is so truly the House of God that one is 
 at a loss to understand those who deny any special 
 sanctity in it. But however irreverent be their re- 
 gard for the church which they themselves fre- 
 quent, I think there are very few who can without 
 some serious emotion enter an old church in which 
 generations of men and women and children have 
 worshipped, who are now lying in silent graves 
 around it. 
 
 I don't think you, my friend, whatever your creed 
 or your sympathies, could have sat with me in one 
 of thoee plain pine pews, seeing the sunshine of 
 that autumn falling through the shattered building 
 on the ruined interior, and have failed to appreci- 
 ate something of the sanctity of the old place of 
 prayer. It was nearly noon. Through the broken 
 roof one broad stream of golden light fell on the 
 open place between the front pew and the pulpit. 
 There the table used to stand which they called 
 their Lord's table, and from which they received, 
 as their catechism expressed it, "by faith," that is, 
 by the highest assurance men can have, unhesitat- 
 ing belief, the body and blood of Him they wor-
 
 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 15 
 
 shipped. There, one by one, when the work and 
 worry, the sorrow and sin of this life were ended, 
 they were laid with closed eyes and calm faces, 
 and thence carried out to the gathering place of 
 the dead. Where are they now, strong men and 
 matrons, young men and maidens, little children 
 and patriarchs ? As I asked myself the question 
 I walked across the floor to a window and looked 
 out. Yes, they were all lying there, as so many 
 millions of the Christian dead all over the world 
 lie, in circles that sweep over the surface of the 
 globe, ever- widen ing circles as their faith has ex- 
 tended among men, all with their faces heavenward 
 and their feet towards Jerusalem. 
 
 We spent more than a half-hour in the old church. 
 I climbed by the wrecked stairway into the pulpit. 
 Its interior casing was falling to pieces, and in a 
 recess within were some scraps of paper, which had 
 slipped between the boards from the shelf under 
 the desk. On one was a memorandum of the min- 
 ister for notices to be given of the weekly prayer 
 
 meeting at Mr. 's house, and a Thursday night 
 
 lecture at the school-house on the mountain. On 
 another was a funeral notice. There was nothing 
 else legible, except a torn scrap, the lower part of a 
 leaf of a hymn-book, and on this was a stanza not 
 unfitting the associations of the place. So for the 
 moment I assumed the position of the erstwhile 
 minister and said, from the pulpit, " Let us sing :"
 
 16 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 " Oh what amazing joys they feel 
 While to their golden harps they sing, 
 And sit on every heavenly hill 
 And spread the triumphs of their King !" 
 
 There were only three of us, but one was leader 
 of a choir in an up-country church ; and we sang a 
 good old tune, which, perhaps, they who were now 
 silent around the church used to sing to the same 
 words and perhaps will some day sing again. 
 
 And while we were singing I saw a vision ; not 
 supernatural, but as lovely for the moment as any 
 imagination. In the open doorway at the other 
 end of the church was standing a little child, a girl 
 of five years old, dressed in white, with masses of 
 red-gold hair which the wind, coming in from be- 
 hind her, was waving and shaking. Her great blue 
 eyes were looking with wonderment while she lis- 
 tened. As the sound ceased she vanished. We 
 might have thought it an apparition, but that, going 
 to the door, we saw her running down the road as 
 fast as her little feet would carry her, towards a 
 large farm-house, nearly a half-mile off. Her story 
 told at the house might have been the foundation 
 of a mid-day ghost story for the neighborhood, the 
 coming back of old-time people to sing an old hymn 
 in the ruined church. But they could hardly sup- 
 pose that ghosts would come in a travelling car- 
 riage drawn by a very solid pair of gray horses.
 
 II 
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 
 
 IT matters little which way you drive in Vermont 
 to seek beautiful scenery. Every road furnishes it. 
 The question each morning, which way we shall go, 
 is not a very serious one. Ordinarily we ask about 
 the roads in all directions, but not for the sake of 
 getting information. That is hopeless. Few now 
 have knowledge of a road to any place except the 
 nearest railway station. At the station no one 
 knows a road more than two or three miles away. 
 This is not exaggeration. It is simply the result 
 of the abandonment of carriage travel and the uni- 
 versal use of the rail. Intercommunication between 
 outlying farms and villages is nearly at an end. 
 The old social intercourse and mutual dependence 
 of the country folk is mostly gone. The fathers 
 and mothers knew every family within a circuit of 
 ten or twenty miles. There are not so many fami- 
 lies in the circuit now, but many have ceased, in 
 this generation, to be even acquaintances one with 
 another. 
 
 Night after night, sitting by the fire in the tavern
 
 1 8 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 public-room, with ten or fifteen of the neighbors 
 gathered for the evening talk, we have inquired 
 about adjoining towns and roads thither, whether 
 there are inns, whether the roads cross mountains, 
 whether there are streams, ponds, lakes, which way 
 and whither the watercourses run, but all in vain. 
 And at the same time these men discuss with ample 
 intelligence the Irish land question, the position of 
 the French in Africa, the last news from Ethiopian 
 explorers, and the politics of the United States. 
 We seldom hear home politics talked about. 
 
 From all this you may infer that a ride through 
 Vermont and New Hampshire is a journey of dis- 
 covery. We go by inquiring almost from mile to 
 mile. A good map, already marked over and over 
 with the lines of our old routes, lies on the carriage 
 seat. We start like a ship and lay our course by 
 compass, or rather by the sun, for some place which 
 on the scale seems to be at a reasonable distance, 
 and ask from time to time whether we are on the 
 right road. Occasionally we go wrong. It is of 
 no account. We keep on, and arrive somewhere. 
 
 In the spring a trout rod lies ready for use in 
 the carriage. In the autumn, a heavier rod and a 
 gun. Here and there along the road are tempting 
 spots for the angler, and I stop the horses awhile. 
 In the forest roads, covered with fallen leaves and 
 nuts in autumn, partridges are often to be seen, 
 sometimes to be shot. Always the scenery is at-
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 19 
 
 tractive. Comparisons of scenery are usually ab- 
 surd. No two landscapes possess all of the same 
 characteristics. One lake is unlike another, and it 
 is impossible to compare one with another, except 
 when the characteristics are so diverse that it may 
 be fairly said of one or the other that it possesses 
 little or no beauty. Mountains have their peculi- 
 arities, and one can seldom be intelligently placed 
 in comparison with another as to the general quality 
 of its scenery. One is bolder, grander, another is 
 richer in lofty masses of color, and another has 
 wonderful outlines of form against the sky. But, 
 with some experience, I know no country which, as 
 you drive through it, presents more variety of 
 beauty, more rapid changes in the character of the 
 beauty, more alternations of grandeur and pastoral 
 calmness, more wild ravines, and more far -distant 
 views, than Northern New England. 
 
 Proposing a wandering drive along the Green 
 Mountains, I sent my horses to Brattleboro' as a 
 starting-point. While waiting there for a friend I 
 drove in various directions around the town. One 
 could pass a month in Brattleboro' and drive every 
 day a new road, and a good road, every rod of 
 which is beautiful, whether in Vermont or across 
 the river in New Hampshire. Streams pour down 
 a dozen valleys between high hills, some cultivated 
 to the summits, some forest-covered. Wild-flowers 
 were out that spring in an abundance that seemed
 
 20 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 to surpass all former springs. The forests along 
 the road -sides were luxuriant with thousands of 
 flowers of a hundred varieties. The lateness of 
 the spring had kept back the usual growth of early 
 May, and the sudden coming of a succession of 
 warm days had brought out the later and the earlier 
 flora together. A mile out of the village there was 
 a spot which was superb. Masses of violets grew 
 as thick as pansies in garden beds, the large tall 
 white and pale pink in clumps with the equally tall 
 and large yellow, the small white and small yellow, 
 and two varieties of blue, all intermingling and 
 covering the ground at the edge of the forest, 
 formed a continuous bed of color stretching a hun- 
 dred rods with scarcely a break. Trilium, purple 
 and painted, nodded over this bed in the deeper 
 shadow of the woods now just leafing out. Anem- 
 one, tiarella, mitre- wort, were abundant. 
 
 Coming recently from watching the advance of 
 spring in the South, the contrast was vast and strik- 
 ing. The luxuriant green over the whole surface 
 of the country, ground and tree alike bursting out 
 in splendid color, had not been a feature of spring 
 in Florida and South Georgia. Last year's vege- 
 tation does not stand up here, dry and yellow, to 
 be slowly hidden by the growth of this year, as in 
 southern countries. Snow is a wonderful beauti- 
 fier. It packs down the dead growth of the past, so 
 that the first show of the new growth is visible and
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 21 
 
 colors the earth and the landscape. There is a 
 day when all the country looks wintry; the next 
 day soft green tints show in the damp hollows or 
 on the southern slopes; then in one or two or three 
 days the whole landscape has become brilliantly 
 green. The forests have begun to color. We all 
 know the gorgeous autumnal colors, but little has 
 been written of the exquisite tints of the spring 
 forests in New England. They are often quite as 
 beautiful as the autumn glories. They are softer 
 tints, but more varied pink, mauve, purple, and 
 gray, in broad and gentle gradations, broken now 
 and then by deep tints where the maple is budding. 
 Sometimes in valleys, where willows are plenty and 
 when sunlight falls richly after a shower, there are 
 patches of golden yellow stretching across green 
 fields which are as beautiful as one's golden dreams. 
 Did you ever meet with one of those modern aesthet- 
 ic maniacs who suggest improvements for Nature 
 and criticise her minglings of color ? One such 
 condemns, as "in bad taste," the mingling of green 
 with yellow in a field where thousands of yellow but- 
 tercups bloom. He suggests, as much more cor- 
 rect and pleasant to the eye, the contrast afforded 
 by a midsummer field where the white daisies are 
 abundant. There is no disputing about tastes. 
 Nature offers something for every one ; but that is 
 a faulty education which has brought any one to 
 apply to the works of the great Artist the arbitrary
 
 22 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 notions of what we call art criticism. Nature en- 
 courages no ideas of harmony in color. She min- 
 gles with a free hand all colors, and puts to shame 
 the temporary and changing tastes of humanity, 
 which trammel and harness artists and drive them 
 on railway tracks of art production. Old nations 
 of men are free from the foolish rules of so-called 
 civilization in this matter of color. The gorgeous 
 products and minglings of color which characterize 
 the Chinese porcelains are doing a great deal to 
 educate the dim and doubtful tastes of western Eu- 
 rope and America. The Saracens understood bet- 
 ter than any race of men in any age the value of 
 free and unrestrained use of color, and contrasted 
 colors without regard to any ideas of what is called 
 harmony. They decorated houses and temples as 
 Nature decorates the earth, and kept prominent al- 
 ways the great lesson of the visible world, that with 
 a blue sky and a green landscape every one of the 
 infinite variety of hues of flowers is perfectly har- 
 monious. 
 
 Taking Brattleboro' as a starting-point, we could 
 cross the Connecticut into New Hampshire or strike 
 out westward into Vermont. Choosing the latter 
 course, we could continue the route northward on 
 the eastern side of the Green Mountains, wander- 
 ing hither and thither on the way, or take one of 
 the roads westward and cross the mountains. What 
 matters it which road you take ? It is always easy
 
 THE ( IU-RCH-BELL ANNOUNCES "EVKNIMi 
 MEETING"
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 23 
 
 to turn your own carriage, change your direction, 
 follow the new wish of the moment. We could go 
 out to Wilmington, and over the Green Mountains 
 to Bennington ; we could turn northward from Wil- 
 mington and ascend and descend the hills of Dover, 
 now getting far-off views over New Hampshire, now 
 seeing to the west the Vermont mountains over- 
 hanging lovely valleys. The country directly west 
 of Brattleboro', although hilly, abounds in fine sce- 
 nery, and the valley at Wilmington is as lovely as 
 any Swiss valley. We chose a route to the north- 
 west. We drove out on the right bank of West 
 River, following up the stream, with intent to spend 
 the night at Fayetteville, but loitered along the way, 
 and after sunset pulled up at a little inn in Will- 
 iamsville. 
 
 There is seldom any trouble in finding employ- 
 ment for the evening at a country inn or in the vil- 
 lage. Sometimes the church-bell announces " even- 
 ing meeting," and one may do worse than to attend 
 it, if only for the sake of seeing people and study- 
 ing character. Almost always the inn is the place 
 of gathering for some of the natives, who discuss 
 all kinds of subjects with abundant intelligence, 
 and generally with striking clearness and simplicity 
 of thought and diction. 
 
 It is not difficult for a stranger to lead the con- 
 versation towards local incident and history. There 
 is no country village in the land which cannot fur-
 
 24 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 nish personal histories of sufficient interest to make 
 volumes of very instructive biography. You err 
 if you imagine that only those lives are romantic 
 which are passed among crowds in cities. The 
 country life abounds in mysteries, romances. The 
 clergyman or the doctor either could furnish the 
 novelist with a great deal of material. 
 
 If you don't care to talk, you can always find on 
 the table of the parlor, or on a shelf somewhere, a 
 small stock of books; and if you are a reading 
 man from a city you will be very sure to find these 
 books mostly new to you books you never saw or 
 heard of. There are very few book-stores in New 
 England outside the large cities. The New York 
 or Boston publishers who sell books through retail 
 stores have no means of reaching the inhabitants 
 of Vermont and New Hampshire, except in two or 
 three cities. The American people have not learned 
 to any great extent to order books by mail. In the 
 country few books are bought except such as are 
 brought to the door by agents. For this trade a 
 great many books are made of which no one in the 
 cities ever hears. They are of various classes of 
 literature, some of them good, instructive compila- 
 tions of history, travel, scientific information, some 
 only trash, catchpenny books. It is always good- 
 fortune if one finds that the local history of the 
 town or county in which he is resting has been 
 gathered and published. Many such histories have
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 25 
 
 been made in the north country. They are gen- 
 erally subscription - books, and special attention is 
 given to the personal and family histories of sub- 
 scribers. Portraits adorn them. Now and then an- 
 cestral portraits are reproduced in wood or litho- 
 graphic prints. They are always readable books, 
 especially readable for the traveller. 
 
 William sville is in the town of Newfane, a very 
 old Vermont township. An excellent history of this 
 town has been published abounding in material of 
 much more than local interest. 
 
 In 1789, at the old Field mansion on the 22d of 
 February, Major Moses Joy was married to Mrs. 
 Hannah Ward, widow of William Ward. This 
 William Ward had died insolvent, leaving debts of 
 considerable amount. At the second marriage 
 Mrs. Ward stood in a closet with no clothing on, 
 and held out her hand to Major Joy through a hole, 
 and the ceremony was thus performed. 
 
 This is the only instance I have ever met with in 
 American history of what in England has been vari- 
 ously called a smock marriage, or a marriage en 
 chemise. The idea was, and in parts of England 
 still is prevalent, that if a husband takes a wife 
 with nothing on her he avoids a legal liability to 
 pay her debts, or the debts of a former husband, 
 some of whose property she might possibly bring 
 with her to her new alliance. This vulgar error 
 has led to many curious marriages. One is re-
 
 26 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 corded in which the woman left her room in the 
 night, naked, by the window, standing on the top 
 round of a high ladder, where she put on new 
 clothes, and came down feeling satisfied that she 
 had left all old obligations in the house, and come 
 out scot-free. I think I remember in Notes and 
 Queries an account of the surprise of a clergyman 
 in an English church, when a bride appeared for 
 an appointed marriage, wrapped only in a white 
 sheet, and this within a very recent period. The 
 old error, it seems, prevailed in Vermont so late as 
 1789, and Major Joy took what he thought the safe 
 way of avoiding the responsibilities of the departed 
 and now not lamented Mr. Ward. 
 
 There was another old error which also lingered 
 in Vermont, according to the Newfane historian. 
 Inasmuch as a writ was directed in words com 
 manding the sheriff to take the body of the debtor, 
 a common notion was held that the writ ran against 
 that body living or dead. At a funeral in Dum- 
 merston, the adjoining town (no date is given), the 
 officers arrested the body on its way to the grave. 
 The procession stopped, the bearers gave bail for 
 the appearance of the debtor, buried him, and paid 
 the debt. In 1820, one Lee, in prison on a bail 
 bond, died. The sheriff would not deliver his 
 body to his family, fearing it would amount to an 
 escape, and himself become liable. The consent 
 of the creditors was obtained, and the sheriff, thus
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 2^ 
 
 relieved from his apprehended responsibility, re- 
 leased his prisoner. This strange error was not 
 confined to Vermont. Similar instances of arrest- 
 ing the body have been recorded in other parts of 
 the country. 
 
 In the morning we changed our minds and turned 
 south-westward. The drive from Williamsville to 
 Wilmington is one to be remembered. A good 
 road with a slight upward grade for four miles, 
 then up a hill, through a small village, on for a 
 mile ; cross a bridge, up a steep hill, through Rock 
 River village ; still uphill through forest, the air 
 pure and life-giving ; uphill, uphill, a long steady 
 pull to a church on a hill which is Dover Centre, 
 and now behind us to the eastward there is no 
 limit to our vision in the clear atmosphere which 
 lies over New Hampshire. The blue horizon line 
 away yonder must be almost where the sky and 
 ocean meet. As we go on higher, the view seems 
 to stretch yet farther into distance, east and north- 
 east, and north, while close below us farms and 
 valleys, hills and ravines lie as on a map. A half- 
 mile beyond the church we cross the summit, and 
 the western view of the Green Mountains bursts on 
 us. And now we descend into a charming valley, 
 and following a meadow brook which grows to 
 be a river, and is the east branch of the Deerfield 
 River, we reach Wilmington at noon. 
 
 It is a pretty village in a pretty valley. Hence
 
 28 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 it is twenty miles to all sorts of places twenty to 
 Brattleboro,' twenty to Bennington, the same to 
 Hoosac Tunnel and to Coleraine. 
 
 It may serve to show the freedom of carriage trav- 
 el if I rapidly indicate the ways we went after this 
 from day to day. From Wilmington we drove on 
 southward and westward to Readsboro' City, a busy 
 village among the mountains, at the junction of the 
 east and west branches of the Deerfield River. 
 Thence our route lay up the West Branch, a wild 
 road of much beauty, to Hartwellville ; then by a 
 winding valley road to Stamford, and down to 
 North Adams in Massachusetts ; through the un- 
 rivalled scenery in which Williamstown is situated ; 
 down the Hoosac valley, and around a shoulder 
 of the mountain to Bennington in Vermont ; thence 
 up the western side of the Green Mountains to 
 Manchester. Northward now from Manchester, 
 we drove up the beautiful valley between the high 
 mountains on the east and Equinox and the Dorset 
 mountains on the west, to Wallingford. There we 
 turned the horses eastward again. From Man- 
 chester we might have taken a route west of the 
 Dorset Mountain, by which we would have gone 
 to Lake St. Catharine, a very lovely lake, whereon 
 is a large hotel in a grove of pines. Thence the 
 route is pleasant and generally level, with good 
 roads, to Rutland, or to Castleton and on north- 
 ward. I have often driven in this direction. But
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 29 
 
 now, without any special reason, we recrossed the 
 Green Mountain range. 
 
 The little highland village called Mechanicsville 
 is in the town of Mount Holly, which includes the 
 Green Mountain country east of Wallingford, where 
 the hills run lower than to the northward and south- 
 ward of it. The Central Vermont Railway line finds 
 its way from Bellows Falls to Rutland across these 
 lower hills in a north-westerly direction. The wagon 
 road from Wallingford wanders in various beautiful 
 ways. The pass across is one of the easiest and 
 most practicable between the Massachusetts line 
 and the gorge of the Winooski south of Mount 
 Mansfield. 
 
 The carriage traveller may do well to make a note 
 of these passes. If you drive northward from Troy 
 or elsewhere on the west side of the mountains, you 
 can cross them to the east side and the Connecticut 
 valley only by one or another of these mountain 
 roads. 
 
 From Bennington you can go over to Wilming- 
 ton and Brattleboro' by a road which I have never 
 happened to find in good order. From Manchester 
 you can cross through Peru to Chester by a turn- 
 pike road, usually in fair condition. From Walling- 
 ford you can cross by the road I was now driving, 
 to Ludlow. From Rutland you can cross by a road 
 which I have found so wretched that the least said 
 about it the better. From Brandon or Middlebury
 
 30 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 you can cross by good roads, that one which goes 
 through Ripton passing the Bread Loaf Inn, and 
 descending eastward to the hilly country south of 
 Montpelier. North of this you can go through the 
 mountains by a good road, with no serious hills, 
 along the bank of the Winooski, to Waterbury and 
 Montpelier. Still north of this you can drive over 
 the rolling country around the north end of the 
 mountains from Burlington to Hyde Park. There 
 are other roads through and over the Green Mount- 
 ains, but none of them can be recommended with 
 certainty from year to year as practicable for pleas- 
 ure carriages. 
 
 The morning was dark. We had had showers 
 in the night, and the clouds still lay low in the 
 valley at Wallingford. But a breath of air from 
 the westward, slowly increasing, and beginning to 
 move first the mists and then the leaves of the trees, 
 gave promise of a clearing off. We did not start 
 till late in the forenoon, and then the horses had 
 four miles of pretty steady uphill work before them. 
 A clear stream, swollen with last night's rain, roared 
 down by the side of the road as we slowly ascended. 
 There are doubtless trout in that stream, for along 
 it now and then we saw boys fishing. None of 
 them had any trout. All agreed that the water 
 was too high, but all asserted the presence of trout. 
 The faith of an angler is worthy the study of phi- 
 losophers. If a boy knows that one trout has been
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 31 
 
 taken in a stream, he will fish contentedly all day for 
 another ; and though he may take innumerable chubs 
 and dace and minnows, without sight of the trout he 
 seeks, he nevertheless throws in his bait a thousand 
 times, and every time with perfect assurance that 
 the next fish that takes it will have spotted skin 
 and golden sheen below. So with all of us. They 
 who know nothing about angling have few if any 
 parallels in life to this faith, which is the underlying 
 charm of going a-fishing. One cannot fish for long 
 without success in a stream or lake in which he 
 does not believe there are any fish. A few casts 
 of the flies, a few minutes waiting for a bite at bait 
 in this or that hole, and he abandons the place. 
 But if he has seen a trout rise to a fly, or dash 
 along the clear brook, it is enough. Thereafter 
 faith takes hold of him, and the day goes on joy- 
 ously to the end, even through he takes nothing. 
 For the taking of fish is but a small part of the 
 enjoyment of going a-fishing. The innumerable 
 sounds and sights of nature, the luxury of open air, 
 the clouds, the winds, the sunshine, the rain, the 
 cutting off of thought of business, worry, care (which 
 is cut off most effectually by the presence of the 
 angler's faith in his rod and skill), these can be 
 appreciated only by those who love to use rod and 
 line. 
 
 We drove through East Wallingford and then 
 wandered over hills, with many far and many lovely
 
 32 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 views until, on a hill-top, we entered the little village 
 of Mechanicsville, consisting of a large factory, two 
 churches, and a group of white houses under trees. 
 The factory makes children's toys. It was startling, 
 away up on the top of the Green Mountains, on the 
 outlet of a small lake, to find a village supported by 
 an employment so closely related to the home life 
 of all the country. The forests of the neighbor- 
 hood grow the wood, the mountain streams drive 
 the saw-mills which rough-shape it, a steam-engine 
 whirls the turning lathes and the various machines 
 which give form to the objects. Here is another 
 subject of thought for the philosopher. The angling 
 boys were the morning illustrations of faith. The 
 noon resting-place is a village where the inhabitants 
 live by play. Nothing but play. The waters of a 
 beautiful lake flow out over the factory wheels, work- 
 ing for play. Play clothes and feeds these families, 
 enriches the manufacturers, supports perhaps these 
 two churches whose spires rise side by side. It is 
 a bright, cleanly, thriving-looking little village ; the 
 houses are neatly painted ; the gardens are brilliant 
 with flowers. 
 
 The frivolities of life have their uses. Children 
 must play, ought to play; and grown men and 
 women owe it to themselves to play sometimes. If 
 you find any one who doubts the usefulness of play, 
 tell him that it has its utility in this at least, that it 
 runs a prosperous village in the Green Mountains,
 
 IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 33 
 
 and employs a happy population with remunerative 
 work. 
 
 In the afternoon our road led down the eastern 
 slopes of the hills to the valley where Black River 
 comes out from the succession of lakes at Plymouth 
 and Tyson. We drove through Ludlow, and spent 
 the night at Proctorsville. Next day we crossed 
 the Connecticut into New Hampshire. 
 3
 
 in 
 
 A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 
 
 I HAD pulled up at the door of a village store 
 and gone in to make a purchase. I was standing 
 at the counter. It was a cold day, and there were 
 a half-dozen men sitting around the stove. All 
 were strangers to me, for the village was out of my 
 regular course of driving. I would have gone out 
 immediately after making my little purchase, but 
 that a remark from one of the men to the surround- 
 ing group interested me. It was made by a man 
 whose face was bright and intelligent, but whose 
 tone and style of talking marked him at once as 
 somewhat dogmatic and given to laying down the 
 law among his neighbors. I found afterwards that 
 he was a young medical man, who had been but 
 two or three years in the village, studious in his 
 profession and remarkably successful, but fond of 
 collisions with the Freewill Baptist minister, whose 
 church was the only one in the neighborhood. The 
 Doctor was an " educated man ;" that is, he was a 
 college graduate, and a man of some reading. The 
 Minister was not an educated man, and the Doctor
 
 A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 35 
 
 was a thorn in his side. Many localities in the 
 country are situated much as this was. But, on 
 the whole, the good -sense of the average man is 
 superior to illogical reasoning, however specious, 
 in or out of the pulpit, and sound orthodox belief 
 holds its own against unsound reason and imagi- 
 nary theology. 
 
 They were talking about miracles, and the young 
 Doctor said : " You know as well as I do, Stephen, 
 that everything in this world moves in regular 
 order. The laws of nature are what we all have 
 to depend on, and they never change. It's certain 
 that if you plant potatoes they won't come up 
 pumpkins. Neither you nor any man here ever 
 saw a miracle. You never heard of one in your 
 life in these parts. You never heard of pumpkin 
 vines growing from potatoes. It stands to reason 
 and common-sense that when no man in this town 
 ever saw anything happen that wasn't in the regu- 
 lar course of natural law, anything supernatural, it 
 isn't likely such things are going to happen here." 
 
 I looked at Stephen, as the Doctor called him. 
 He was an elderly man, hard - featured and sun- 
 burned. There was a shrewd twinkle in his eye, 
 but he looked at the stove and not at the Doctor, 
 and there was silence for a moment while he pon- 
 dered. Then he spoke in a mild, inquiring sort of 
 way, which contrasted with the Doctor's somewhat 
 self-opinionated tone.
 
 36 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 " I don't know much about the laws of natur', 
 but I suppose you mean something like this that 
 when I let go that jack-knife it '11 fall on the floor ;" 
 and he stretched out a long arm holding an open 
 knife by the blade between his thumb and finger. 
 
 " Exactly," said the Doctor ;" that's the law of 
 gravitation." 
 
 " And it's sure to fall, and I can bet my money 
 on it, and I needn't be afraid of a miracle ? Look 
 here, Doctor, where did the law that binds it to fall 
 come from ? What made that particular law ?" 
 
 The Doctor was honest ; that was evident from 
 his reply. "The learned men who have investi- 
 gated the laws of nature have not found the origin 
 of the laws. They will in time. It's only in recent 
 years that science has made its great discoveries 
 in the laws themselves. Heat, light, color, electric- 
 ity, all the great characteristics of the changing 
 world and of matter itself, have never been under- 
 stood as they are now." 
 
 " And you can't tell me what made the law that 
 binds that jack-knife to fall down ?" 
 
 " No, I can't. It's enough to know as certain 
 that it will fall. Just let go, and you'll see the cer- 
 tainty." 
 
 " No chance of anything supernat'ral ; any mira- 
 cle?" 
 
 " Miracle be hanged. Let go the blade." 
 
 Stephen's thumb and finger separated and stood
 
 A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 37 
 
 stretched out wide apart. The jack-knife was not 
 on the floor. It was hanging to the wooden ceiling 
 overhead, its blade buried a half-inch in the soft 
 pine. For about ten seconds no one spoke. 
 Stephen was looking at the Doctor. 
 
 " Suthin' supernat'ral happened, didn't it ?" said 
 Stephen. 
 
 " You jerked the knife up yourself." 
 
 " Well, that warn't nat'ral, war it ?" 
 
 The Doctor hesitated. " Now see here, Doctor," 
 said the old man, "just tell me how old is your law 
 that the jack-knife's got to fall down." 
 
 " Millions of years old. Just as old as there has 
 been anything to fall." 
 
 " And how old was the law that said that jack- 
 knife must go up there and stick its blade in that 
 white-pine ceiling. Just three minutes and a half 
 old by the clock. Now what I want to know is 
 where did your law that it must go down come 
 from. You say you don't know. Well, it stands 
 to sense, then, and you can't deny that it may come 
 from some one that makes it go down just as I 
 made it go up. If your science is worth a sneeze 
 it oughtn't to deny what it don't know nothing 
 about. And if that's so, it's always just as like as 
 not whoever made the thing go down will make it 
 go up, without you or I or any one else knowing 
 what made it go, any more than you know what 
 made me jerk that knife up yonder. You tell me
 
 38 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 that if I plant potatoes they won't come up squash- 
 es, but you just tell me what plants potatoes, or 
 what makes me plant 'em, anyhow. If I don't plant 
 'em there ain't going to be any potatoes nor squash- 
 es. It's according to reason that if potatoes come 
 up because I planted potatoes, squashes don't come 
 up from them, because some one else takes care of 
 that part of the business. I don't believe in your 
 argiments that laws always may be depended on, 
 when you tell me yourself that you don't know 
 where the laws come from and how long they're 
 goin' to last. Your science is all right, Doctor, 
 just as long as it talks about what it knows about. 
 But when your science says a knife's bound to fall 
 down, and don't take into account that something 
 supernat'ral may interfere that science don't know 
 nothing about, sich as my sudden making up my 
 mind to jerk it up, why your science ain't wuth any 
 more than a last year's almanac to tell a fellow 
 what the weather's goin' to be." 
 
 By this time Stephen's tone and style had changed. 
 He was no longer humble and inquiring, but de- 
 cidedly aggressive. There were some strong words, 
 not exactly profane, adjectively applied to science 
 in the last sentence, which I have omitted. He 
 talked rapidly and vehemently and with pointed 
 logic. Is logic one of the distinguishing character- 
 istics of humanity? There are men, exceptions, 
 sometimes men of eminence, who do not seem to
 
 A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 39 
 
 have any idea of logic, but by the vast majority of 
 men, however uneducated, logical sequence seems 
 instinctively appreciated, and the most illiterate are 
 very sure to detect failure in argument. 
 
 As he talked he rose and stood up, six feet two 
 a mighty frame, fit for tremendous work and he 
 poured out a storm of plain and unanswerable phil- 
 osophic truth, ending up in this wise : " No mira- 
 cles, but only jest steady laws ? Well, accordin' to 
 law that jack-knife will stick there till the wood 
 rots or the steel rusts. Make your prophe-cy if 
 you dare. Say what it '11 do. Is there any law 
 that '11 tell you what '11 come of it? or whether 
 Sam or Timmy won't have it down and pocket it 
 as soon as I'm gone ? You don't know. Well, I 
 do. There's just such a law, and I made it ;" and 
 so saying he reached up his long arm, seized the 
 knife, and strode out of the door, growling as he 
 went. 
 
 " He's a cantankerous old cuss, but he's got a 
 lot o' brains," remarked one of the group. The 
 others signified assent. The Doctor said nothing, 
 but stood looking at the spot in the ceiling where 
 the knife had been. I followed the philosopher. 
 As I drove up the road I overtook him and offered 
 him a ride. He had not noticed me at the store. 
 He discussed my horses, the merits of various styles 
 of buck-board, the weather, the crops, and it was 
 not until we approached a farm which he pointed
 
 40 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 out as his own that any allusion was made to the 
 discussion. There was a field golden with huge 
 pumpkins, which I think form the richest and most 
 gorgeous-looking crop that is ever seen in the fields. 
 "You didn't plant potatoes for that crop," I said. 
 He looked puzzled, then broke into a hearty laugh. 
 "You see the Doctor riled me a little, and I got 
 mad. I tell you what it is, Mister, I never had an 
 edication, and the Doctor had ; and it makes me 
 mad when a man like him talks to a store full o' 
 people as if he knew all he's a-talking about, when 
 he don't. He's been going on about miracles for 
 the last three weeks, because the elder preached a 
 sermon on 'em. I don't belong to the meetin', but 
 my old mother did. Do you see that bunch o' 
 spruces over yonder ? She's there. She believed 
 in miracles. And she knew a heap more than I 
 do. Now I just ask you this : which is best wuth 
 believin', my old mother when she told me the 
 miracles was true because there's a God over the 
 airth, or these consarned edicated fools that go 
 around saying there never could a-been no miracles 
 because they don't know how to work 'em."
 
 IV 
 
 UPHILL IN FOG 
 
 MAPS give little idea of the elevations or depres- 
 sions in the surface of a country, except as the run 
 of the watercourses indicates the slopes. The high 
 mountains of Northern New Hampshire are gen- 
 erally laid down on all maps, but few persons have 
 any idea that in the lower part of the State there 
 is very high land, and that to reach it from the 
 Connecticut on the west, or the Merrimac on the 
 east, an ascent of more than 1000, perhaps more 
 than 1500 feet, must be accomplished. I have no 
 means at present of ascertaining the elevation of 
 the highest farms in such towns as Lempster, Wash- 
 ington, and Stoddard. Some years ago, driving 
 over the high farm country in Stoddard, I was told 
 that this was the highest cultivated land in the 
 State. This may be doubtful, but it is very high, 
 and these towns ought to be above the hay-fever 
 line. Judging from the experience of the direct 
 pull up from Charlestown to Lempster, we should 
 be inclined to think the latter village several thou- 
 sand feet above the Connecticut. It was a mag- 
 nificent ride.
 
 42 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 The morning was foggy. October frequently fills 
 the Connecticut valley with fogs. This was very 
 dense and dark. As we went out from Charles- 
 town and began the uphill journey, we came slow- 
 ly into thinner mist, and after awhile into that most 
 weird and solemn of all lights, the golden atmos- 
 phere of the October sun in fog among autumn 
 forests. Stopping the horses on a water-bar for a 
 little breath, we listened to the silence. Do you 
 know what that means ? It is not listening to noth- 
 ing. There are sounds and many of them ; but in 
 the stillness of a foggy morning these sounds seem 
 to cut sharply into the silence, and thus make you 
 aware of the excessive stillness and calm which 
 reign around you. The fall of a single leaf, broken 
 off by the weight of moisture on it, is distinctly au- 
 dible as it flutters to the ground. The voice of a 
 crow, far away in the fog, comes through the yellow 
 air with a metallic ring. You start along, and the 
 crush of the wheels in the gravel is echoed from 
 the side of the woods across a hollow, so that you 
 think there is a water-fall over there. You stop 
 again, and the echo dies away with a low murmur- 
 ing along the trees, and the stillness is wonderful. 
 
 Uphill and downhill, but more and more uphill, 
 the road mounts the high land. Ahead of us there 
 are long views between the maples and birches, the 
 view ending in yellow mist. We think that point 
 must be the top, but when we reach it the road
 
 UPHILL IN FOG 43 
 
 swings around the side of the hill and stretches on 
 up. We descend at length, but it is into a hollow, 
 and it grows dark and darker in the fog as we go 
 down, till at the bottom, where a stream crosses 
 the road, we think it will rain in five minutes, so 
 deep is the gloom ; but we go up again into the 
 sunny mists, and at length, on a summit, feel for 
 the first time a breath of air coming from the south- 
 ward. When the air begins to move the fog will 
 vanish. Its vanishing now is almost instantaneous. 
 We have scarcely time to exclaim, " See that hill- 
 top over yonder, and that one beyond, and this one, 
 and " far as the eye can reach, rolling away un- 
 der the rich sunlight, lie the red-and-gold hills and 
 the highland farms of New Hampshire. Patches 
 of fog remain here and there and in hollows under 
 the sides of hills, but they disappear in a few min- 
 utes. The view is so sudden and so vast that even 
 my horses stop short and look at it. 
 
 But Lempster is still ahead of us, and we have 
 yet higher heights to overcome. It was nearly 
 twelve o'clock when we reached this little village 
 only four or five houses, with a new church and an 
 abandoned old church. We had dinner, and then 
 went over other heights to Washington. I do not 
 know which stands the higher, Lempster or Wash- 
 ington. Both are attractive places, on account not 
 only of their elevation, but also of their splendid 
 surroundings of scenery.
 
 44 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 Lovel Mountain is prominent near Washington. 
 A farmer told me the legend of the origin of the 
 name. I heard the story fifty years ago, and then 
 believed it, as children believe, with ready faith. 
 We grow sceptical as we grow older. But the farm- 
 er told it as a historic verity, and it is probably 
 about as true as nine-tenths of what we call history. 
 He believed it, and I don't know why you should 
 not. A settler near this mountain in early times, 
 named Lovel, was splitting rails, when six Indians 
 surrounded him and made him their prisoner. My 
 informant was sure of the number there were six. 
 The settler agreed to go quietly with them if they 
 would wait till he finished splitting the log he was 
 at work on. They consented. He adjusted his 
 wedge in the long split, and induced them to take 
 hold of the two sides to hasten matters by pulling 
 the log apart. Then knocking out his wedge, he 
 caught their twelve hands tight and fast in the 
 spring of the closing split, and applied his axe, se- 
 riatim, to the six heads. The result was six dead 
 Indians, and the later result the name Lovel 
 Mountain.
 
 V 
 SWEET-SCENTED FERN 
 
 THERE can be no reasonable doubt that the sense 
 which is most closely linked with our powers of 
 memory is the sense of smell. We are greatly 
 puzzled sometimes to know what has suddenly 
 brought to mind an event of long ago, a person 
 whom we have not thought of for years, a scene 
 that has been forgotten since childhood. Very 
 often this sudden memory has been roused by a 
 passing odor, the never-lost perfume of a flower, a 
 handkerchief, a meadow. So subtle are the opera- 
 tions of the mind that we know little about them, 
 and least of all about that stow-away place which 
 we call memory. Neither you nor I know a hun- 
 dred thousandth part of what we really do know, 
 what we have learned, treasured, and now keep 
 stored up ; only it is like some things we have so 
 carefully laid away that we can't find them when 
 we want them, or have ceased to know that we 
 possess them. 
 
 There was once a boy. It was a great while ago ; 
 that is, it seemed to him a long while fo come,
 
 46 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 when he, a boy, looked forward to the old age he 
 afterwards reached. But when he was an old man 
 it did not seem such a great while ago that he was 
 a boy, living in a small house, half log half clap- 
 board, on the edge of a clearing in New Hampshire. 
 This boy lived there very much alone ; for though 
 he had a father and a mother, it goes without say- 
 ing that a small boy on a new farm leads a lone- 
 some life when father and mother are at work all 
 the waking hours. When he was ten years old he 
 was a hard-working boy too. He had never been 
 to school, never even learned to read. There was 
 not a book, not so much as a Testament, in the 
 house ; and so far as he had ever heard, there were 
 no books in the world, nor any God in it or over it. 
 I wonder if you know, what is the solemn fact, that 
 there are families, American families, with one, two, 
 and many children, in New England States, of ex- 
 actly this description. 
 
 Another family came into that part of the coun- 
 try, and another small house went up on the oppo- 
 site bank of the lake ; for the houses stood on a 
 pond, or lake, which was a half-mile broad and two 
 or three miles long, and the old forest was all 
 around it except for the two clearings. Now came 
 into that boy's life a new light, and he began to 
 know the world ; for there was a daughter in the 
 other family, besides two sons ; and what cannot a 
 boy learn of the world from two other boys and
 
 SWEET-SCENTED FERN 47 
 
 one happy little girl. He learned more from her 
 than from them. For somehow he learned from 
 her to look into himself, and think about himself 
 and what he was. That is a long step towards 
 knowledge of the world when a boy gets into the 
 way of studying himself thoughtfully. For almost 
 all the joys, ambitions, and enjoyments ; almost all 
 the sins, labors, and sorrows of mature life are min- 
 iatured in the boy life. The little pleasures of the 
 child are like in character to the great pleasures 
 of the man. The triumph of a successful attack 
 on a woodchuck's hole is the far-away antetype of 
 a great operation in stocks or the brilliant capture 
 of a large corporation. 
 
 Many a summer evening when his work was 
 done he paddled his dug-out across the pond, and 
 he and she drifted along the shore, and he sat si- 
 lent while she told him stories of the town in which 
 she had lived, and the people in that (to her) great 
 assemblage of humanity. Many a Sunday they 
 wandered together in the woods and out in the 
 clearing along the bank of the lake, brushing 
 through thick masses of fern that filled the sunny 
 atmosphere with delicious odor. 
 
 After the first few months of their acquaintance, 
 when he was twelve and she was ten years old, he 
 had begun to regard her as the dependence of his 
 life, and so to look to her for help. It was hard 
 work to bring himself to confess to her that he did
 
 48 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 not know how to read ; but he did it, and asked 
 her to teach him. There was a rock among the 
 sweet-scented fern by the shore, where in the pleas- 
 ant Sunday mornings she gave him regularly a four- 
 hours' lesson. She was not long in teaching him 
 all she knew, and after that they progressed to- 
 gether. 
 
 They talked much and thought much. She told 
 him Bible stories, and they were about the only 
 stories she knew except two or three wonderful 
 fairy stories which he and she mixed up with the 
 Bible stories, until they grew wiser, as new settlers 
 came and brought books, which they borrowed. 
 Much they learned out of their own heads, reading 
 together and giving each to the other, in childish 
 wise ways, their deductions and reasonings about 
 things visible and invisible, things of earth and 
 things unearthly if not truly heavenly. Do you 
 imagine their deductions were worthless ? Nay, 
 the ratiocinations of a boy and a girl about the in- 
 finite and invisible are about as valuable in result 
 as are those of many of the philosophers which fill 
 the thousand pages of modern books. They learned 
 as much of final truth as you can learn from all the 
 metaphysicians. 
 
 It needs not to say that he learned the old les- 
 son of love at the same time, or even before he 
 learned his letters among the ferns. So began his 
 life. At seventeen he came out from his wild
 
 SWEET-SCENTED FERN 49 
 
 home into the crowded world. There is no space 
 to tell of his method of farming his new farm. He 
 went at it with the experience of the boy who had 
 cleared a forest and rolled rocks out of the meadow 
 land. It was a terrible piece of work, begun with 
 semi-starvation, carried on with slow, steady deter- 
 mination. Starting as a day-laborer, he achieved 
 in six years or so a superintendent's position with 
 a living salary. Then he went back to the old 
 farm and married Harriet, who had waited for him, 
 and brought her to the city. 
 
 Fifty years went along, and neither he nor she 
 ever again saw the north country. He accumulated 
 property, and they were good members of their so- 
 cial circle, regular in daily life and Sunday church- 
 going. They had changed, and yet had not changed. 
 Their young lives had been devoid of romance, 
 and there was no romance or sentiment in growing 
 rich or growing old. Practically they had forgot- 
 ten their youth. Certainly they never thought or 
 talked of it. I said their youth was without ro- 
 mance. Yet beyond doubt the forming period in 
 their lives had been when the unspeakable beauty 
 of a boy's and a girl's love hallowed those sunshiny 
 days. They did not know that there was any ro- 
 mance in young love on the silver lake in the 
 mountain moonlight. They did not know there 
 was any romance when he lay in the ferns at her 
 feet and listened while she taught him that b-o-y 
 4
 
 50 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 spells boy and g-i-r-1 spells girl and 1-o-v-e spells 
 love. Therefore there was no romance about it. 
 It was simple matter of fact. They lived matter- 
 of-fact lives when poor, and the same when rich 
 and when surrounded with all the luxuries and 
 elegancies which great wealth commands. They 
 lived, in short, very much as many rich people live 
 who have few resources for mental occupation, 
 who are not given to much reading or much think- 
 ing in fact, just living along, and keeping at the 
 old daily routine of employments. There are 
 many who live in this way, having neither past to 
 enjoy in retrospect nor future to enjoy in prospect, 
 only comfortable in the monotonous present. 
 
 He was growing feeble. His brain was weary 
 or worn. It hurts the brain to use it forever on 
 one line of employment. His had been used for 
 nothing but business work now a half-century, and 
 whether in memory, judgment, or looking to the 
 future, no thought had occupied it except thought 
 of property, buying and selling and getting gain. 
 He had not for years been at three minutes' dis- 
 tance from a telegraph-station. His idea of a sum- 
 mer vacation was to go to a hotel where stock bul- 
 letins were always kept up, and stock operations 
 were the day and evening subjects of discussion. 
 No wonder that there came a time when he began 
 to grow strangely silent, sometimes as if drowsy, 
 sometimes morose. Then he suddenly seemed to
 
 SWEET-SCENTED FERN 5 1 
 
 forget everything, and neither spoke nor wrote, 
 nor went to his private telegraphic instrument ; for 
 he had made his house an annex to his office and 
 the Exchange, and had lived practically day and 
 night in the street. 
 
 They said his brain was done with work, and his 
 end was near. Still he walked and rode around, 
 but never alone. One day he was riding with his 
 wife in the carriage along an up-town road, silent, 
 unobservant, apparently in a stupor, when sudden- 
 ly he exclaimed, "How sweet the ferns smell in 
 this sunshine, Harriet." She turned to him, and 
 saw that his eyes were closed. She took him 
 home, and after that he lay, week after week, quiet, 
 but apparently without knowing or noticing any- 
 thing or any one. But sometimes they saw a 
 smile spread over his pale face, as if pleasant 
 thoughts were in the old brain. After months of 
 this, one evening in the twilight he reached out his 
 hand to her and said, " How sweet the ferns are, 
 Hattie." Then he seemed perplexed about it, and 
 said, " How sweet the ferns were, Hattie," and 
 then after a little he came into his right mind. 
 
 If in the other life, which is alongside of this our 
 life, close to us, but invisible to us, there are, as we 
 are taught by some serious teachers, angels ap- 
 pointed to each of us, who are sometimes able to 
 influence our thoughts, it would seem sometimes 
 as if those angels held in their hands the ghosts of
 
 52 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 things that are gone, the shades of our lost objects 
 of delight, and somehow made us sensible of their 
 nearness. Did his angel and her angel hold in 
 their hands fragrant ghostly ferns gathered long 
 ago, with subtle odors, sensible not to the actual 
 sense, but quite so to the mental sense ? Or did 
 they bring fronds that grow in elysian fields, which 
 bear odors like those that are here associated with 
 our purest recollections ? Why not ? There are 
 rivers there, and why not golden-rod on their banks, 
 and fragrant mints and ferns ? It must have been 
 from heaven, with attendant benediction, that the 
 odor of the ferns came often to him. For now 
 they two, old man and old wife, lived again togeth- 
 er for many weeks and even months the young life. 
 All its old unrecognized romance and all its ample 
 delight and happy peace of mind came back to 
 them. They talked now of every tree and rock 
 and flower-bed, of every odor of field and forest. 
 You know we cannot describe an odor; we can 
 only say how sweet or disagreeable it was ; but al- 
 ways their saying was, " Do you remember how the 
 air was full of the fragrant everlasting that Sep- 
 tember day when we did so and so ?" and they 
 talked over the old stories; and now she found 
 them in. books and read them to him, and the truth 
 that was in them seemed very true. For were they 
 not both rapidly nearing the world whereof they 
 had talked so much and thought so much, and were
 
 SWEET-SCENTED FERN 53 
 
 they not soon to see Moses and David and Zac- 
 cheus and Bartimeus? For a year or more they 
 were as happy as two children, happy as they had 
 been when children ; happier, I think, for their 
 old hearts went rioting around in the memories of 
 those days, and all the pains of them were gone. 
 Once in the summer-time he said he wished when 
 he should be dead she would send and get a great 
 deal of sweet-scented fern and cover him with it. 
 And she did so. And two or three years after 
 that she died. Do you believe there will be ferns 
 in heaven, sweet ferns, whose odors fill the air and 
 help to memories of young life here ? The old 
 song of the Church says, "There cinnamon and 
 sugar grow, there nard and balm abound." If they 
 reach heaven, and ferns grow there, they two will 
 be found often on some fern-bank. To them that 
 would add much to what Gregory called "the 
 sweet solemnity of those who are come home from 
 the sad labor of this wandering."
 
 VI 
 
 AN ANGLER'S AUGUST DAY 
 
 IT was late in the afternoon of a superb August 
 day, and I had yet some fifteen miles to drive, all 
 the way over hills, and the last three miles up the 
 mountain. I was driving the black horses, heavy 
 animals, but swift devourers of mountain roads, 
 rushing up hills and going down them with sure 
 steps. 
 
 I had been far down the western valley, fishing a 
 magnificent stream which is seldom visited by an- 
 glers, and has in it a goodly stock of trout. It is 
 not to be supposed that in this hot month one can 
 take a large basket of fish in any lake or stream, 
 unless the weather be exceptionally favorable. And 
 this day had been by much too bright. Neverthe- 
 less I had accomplished all that could be desired, 
 all that any sensible angler has right to desire. I 
 had strolled a mile or more, sometimes in, some- 
 times alongside of a glorious torrent, wandering its 
 ancient way through primeval forest, down the last 
 slope of a mountain ravine. My basket was not 
 full, but there were a couple of dozen of fair-sized
 
 AN ANGLER'S AUGUST DAY 55 
 
 fish in it, and some dozens of smaller and more 
 toothsome trout; for to my taste the only trout 
 which equal fresh sardines in delicacy and flavor 
 are the little fellows, from clear cold waters, which, 
 fried brown and crisp with good salt pork, you take 
 by their tails in your fingers and eat bodily, to your 
 gastronomic satisfaction. 
 
 The road now led along a flat stretch of wooded 
 country and came out in a clearing, where has been 
 for more than thirty years a small saw -mill. A 
 stream, rising in a swamp a mile or two above the 
 mill, is dammed at the road-crossing, and sets back 
 a small pond of two or three acres, mostly shallow, 
 except where the old bed of the brook winds 
 through it. The pond was a mirror in the now 
 reddening light of the sun which just rested on the 
 ridge of a tree -fringed hill to the westward. A 
 small boy was standing at the road-side, looking at 
 the water. Oddly enough he recognized me, as 
 having more than once met me on streams in the 
 neighborhood. " Oh, mister !" he shouted, as he saw 
 me, and ran towards the buck-board. Of course I 
 pulled up. 
 
 "There's a buster of a trout in the pond this 
 year. You can see him walloping around every 
 day just about this time. There he goes now. Isn't 
 he a slosher ?" 
 
 Up at the head of the pond, where the stream 
 came in, there was a great swash in the water, and
 
 56 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 the waves which rolled away in a circle indicated a 
 heavy animal of some sort. 
 
 " Isn't it a musk-rat ?" 
 
 " No, sir," with emphasis on the last word. " I've 
 seen him go two feet up into the air more times nor 
 you can count. He mostly stays up there. But he 
 won't take no worm nor grasshopper. Last June 
 father tried him with a white grub, but you see its 
 shaller water up there, and we can't get nowhere 
 near him with the raft without scaring him." 
 
 " Where is your raft ?" 
 
 " Down there by them willers." 
 
 I handed over the reins to my driver and took 
 my rod. It was ready for instant use. I never 
 drive in this country without a rod in the wagon, 
 and when actually off for a day's fishing I do not 
 take the rod apart until I have left the last possible 
 angling places behind me for the day. There were 
 two flies on the leader, which was stout, for fishing 
 a rough river. They were not flies likely to be of 
 any use on a still pond ; so I put on a gossamer 
 leader, with two small gnats for bobbers and a 
 small white moth for the tail. It was early for the 
 moth, but as it was already on the leader in my fly- 
 book I did not change it. 
 
 The raft was a boy's, built for some seventy-five 
 pounds of humanity to float on. Two hundred 
 weight was almost too much for it, and it sunk one 
 or the other end as I balanced myself on it, stand-
 
 AN ANGLER'S AUGUST DAY 57 
 
 ing in my rubber boots with a varying depth of 
 water swashing over my feet. I poled out into and 
 across the pond towards the inlet. The boy was 
 right as to the swirl being that of a trout. As I 
 pushed along carefully and looked ahead I saw two 
 similar swirls three rods apart. There were two of 
 them then, at least, and possibly more ; for now I 
 began to recall the fact that years ago the owner 
 of the saw-mill told me there were large trout in his 
 pond which he could not take ; but I then thought, 
 from its shallow character, with muddy bottom, that 
 he probably saw pickerel or some other fish, espe- 
 cially as the next owner a few years afterwards had 
 told me there were no trout in the pond and no 
 small trout in the swamp brook above it. 
 
 Did you ever pole a raft over a pond with soft 
 mud bottom ? No ? Then you have never enjoyed 
 the finest possible illustration of many scientific 
 principles, action and reaction, the correlation and 
 conservation of forces, the attraction of cohesion, 
 innumerable interesting subjects of consideration, 
 all of which would be pleasant to study if you were 
 not occupied with your immediate purpose of get- 
 ting across the water. There is a pleasant assur- 
 ance of advance as you drop the end of the pole, 
 push gently downward and backward, looking for- 
 ward, and the pole passes through your grasp, 
 renewed again and again, till the end is in your 
 hand and you hold on to draw forward for another
 
 58 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 shove. But you can't draw it forward. It draws 
 you backward, and the heavy raft, moving almost 
 imperceptibly, has yet, with your added weight, 
 sufficient momentum to go forward with your feet 
 while your hands remain stationary, and you turn 
 around, desperately grasping one end of the pole 
 whose other end has gone down deep into the tena- 
 cious bottom mud. It went down so easily, gently, 
 softly, that while you thought you had pushed your 
 raft ten feet forward, you had only pushed your 
 pole nine feet into the mud ; and yet, lovingly as it 
 went into the soft bottom, it refuses to return. Look 
 out for yourself now. Hold on to the pole, or you 
 will be adrift on the pond with no means of reach- 
 ing shore. Hold on with your toes, with the soles 
 of your boots, with your knees, anyhow you can, 
 hold on to the raft. I have seen many an inex- 
 perienced man push his raft out from under his 
 feet. I have done it myself in days of juvenile in- 
 experience. 
 
 My raft was not a very heavy one, and the rule 
 is to use your pole without deep pushing on such 
 ponds, rather dragging, with the end only a little 
 way in the mud. 
 
 I had followed the edge of the old bed of the 
 brook, and with patience and perseverance came 
 within a hundred feet of the place where the last 
 trout had risen. There was no perceptible motion 
 in the air, but there was a motion, nevertheless,
 
 AN ANGLER S AUGUST DAY 59 
 
 such as anglers are familiar with, indicated by the 
 fact that your cast goes out more easily with than 
 against it. My rod was good for long casting, and 
 I could lay the white moth-tail fly down within a 
 few feet of the spot I desired to reach. I laid it 
 down there a dozen times, and nothing else dis- 
 turbed the surface, which now reflected a rosy 
 cloud in the south-west. The sun had gone down. 
 The original impetus given the raft and the exist- 
 ing movement of the atmosphere were carrying me 
 slowly towards the mouth of the brook, which came 
 out, a rod wide, between high banks covered with 
 dense sedges. Up in the stream I saw three or 
 four times the lift of a trout's head as he rose 
 gently to the surface and took in some floating in- 
 sect. He was feeding, August fashion, on some 
 very small gnat, too small for imitation. So I tried 
 approximation, changing the tail -fly, and for the 
 white moth substituting a minute black object, the 
 smallest lure known to my book, or any one's book, 
 being a tiny hook, smaller than any regular number, 
 tied with a yellow body and a delicate sparse black 
 hackle, not an eighth of an inch long. I had drifted 
 to the very mouth of the brook by the time this was 
 ready, and the first cast sent it far up the canal-like 
 stream. As it struck the water there was a mag- 
 nificent roll of the glassy surface, a flash of reflected 
 blue and crimson and pink and white in the wa- 
 ter. It was as if some gorgeous piece of fireworks
 
 60 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 had burst on the dark surface between the sedge 
 banks. 
 
 How many pounds of trout flesh and force were 
 now on the end of that gossamer leader I shall 
 never be able to tell you, for when he felt the 
 slight stroke which fixed the tiny hook in his 
 mouth, he made one swift, short rush, and I found 
 that the leader was fastened on something heavier 
 than a trout. There was nothing to do but break 
 it loose or pole up the stream and try to unfasten 
 it. I broke it, for I wanted another cast over that 
 water. Half of the leader came home, with one fly 
 yet on. I looped the end, put on another of the 
 same small black hackles, cast three times ; at the 
 third cast again saw the brilliant explosion of the 
 water-surface, again struck a heavy fish, and was 
 again fast to something immovable. 
 
 This time I poled up to the spot. I might have 
 hooked a hundred fish there and should never have 
 gotten one. For my tail-fly had fallen each time 
 just about ten feet beyond a great tree-trunk a 
 smooth, round log, two feet thick of which the 
 two ends were embedded in the banks on either 
 side, while the log itself stretched across the stream 
 about six inches below the surface. Under it the 
 water was ten feet deep, and the fish had risen from 
 this hole and plunged back into it, catching the up- 
 per flies in the log. 
 
 Twilight was established by the time I had put
 
 AN ANGLER'S AUGUST DAY 61 
 
 on the small white moth which I proposed to use 
 for the last few casts. You will observe that my 
 raft would not go over the log, and I could go no 
 farther up-stream. So I sent the flies up again 
 and again and again, while the night gathered rap- 
 idly. Our twilights grow short up here in August. 
 The air was ringing with the voices of frogs, with 
 indescribable variety of tone and Annunciation. 
 The sharp cry of a night-bird in the air overhead 
 pierced my ears. I saw a great Cecropia moth 
 crossing the stream just beyond my cast, and a 
 dozen smaller moths flitting over the sedges. Sud- 
 denly, behind me, a trout rose in the old place. I 
 fixed the pole against the log, pushed the raft 
 back, and dropped the tail-fly in the centre of the 
 circle of waves. This time I struck my fish firmly, 
 and he went for open water ; it was an easy matter 
 to bring him in ; he was only a two-pounder. A 
 two-pound trout is a small affair to the angler who 
 has lost a four-pounder. And those two fish I lost 
 were, of course, four-pounders five-pounders ; who 
 can prove to me that they were not ? 
 
 Whatever their weight, I was fully as content as 
 if they were in my basket, which hung on my 
 shoulder, or on the dry end of my raft if they were 
 too large for the basket. I see your smile of in- 
 credulity, my friend; but you are one of the mis- 
 erably uneducated community who will never ap- 
 preciate the fact that the joy of the angler's day is
 
 62 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 in the surroundings of his sport. The very regrets 
 he may have for lost fish are pleasant, not painful, 
 if the day has been bountiful in the ordinary de- 
 lights which attend the fisherman. My day had 
 been exceedingly rich. As the horses came up the 
 dark mountain road, guiding their own steps since 
 I could not see to guide them, I recalled a score of 
 beautiful scenes along the course of the mountain 
 torrent, great bowlders lying in the foam, fern-cov- 
 ered cliffs, under which the river ran swift and 
 smooth, giant white birch -trees on the bank, the 
 outposts of armies of mighty trees behind them, 
 rank on rank as far as eye could penetrate their 
 array. And the dark lagoon-like stream, on which 
 the twilight came down till the stars were reflected 
 in it ; the swoop of the nighthawks overhead ; the 
 call of the whippoorwill sitting on the saw-mill roof 
 and the answer of his kin on the hill-side beyond 
 where can one close the catalogue of sights and 
 sounds and thoughts, which made the hour's delay 
 at the mill-pond a charming episode at the close 
 of an angler's August day ?
 
 VII 
 VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 
 
 " HE was a very old man," said the landlord. 
 
 " How old ?" I asked ; " what do you mean by 
 'very old?'" 
 
 " Well, close on to ninety, I should say. No one 
 exactly knew, and he didn't know himself. At 
 least he said he didn't." 
 
 " He ought to have known a great deal." 
 
 " Well, it ain't always the man that Kves the 
 longest that learns the most. But Uncle Zekel did 
 know a considerable deal. There wasn't a tree or 
 a plant around here he couldn't tell you something 
 about. There wasn't a square foot of land within 
 ten miles that he didn't know everything that would 
 or wouldn't grow on it. Then he understood the 
 weather better than the newspapers nowadays, 
 and he knew human natur' through and through. 
 He never made a mistake in judgin' a man. He 
 was sharp as a steel-trap when any one tried to 
 come it over him. But he was so kind o' simple in 
 his ways and his talk that strangers never thought 
 much of him. Yes, he knew a great deal more
 
 64 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 than any of the rest of us hereabouts. Somehow 
 everybody believed that he could see farther into a 
 stone than any other man." 
 
 We were talking of an old man recently dead. 
 It was at a way-side inn in Vermont, where I had 
 stopped for the horses to feed and rest, and I was 
 talking with the farmer-landlord, seated under a tree 
 that shaded the front of the cottage-inn. Across 
 the road, a little way below, there was a gathering 
 at the door of a small house, which had led to the 
 talk. The village people were coming together to 
 carry to his grave the oldest resident, and while 
 they were gathering the landlord told me about 
 him. 
 
 No one now living remembered when he came to 
 this part of the country. He was a Scotchman by 
 birth, and though long practice had modified his 
 voice and accent, there always remained in it some 
 of the peculiarity which is musical to all who are 
 familiar with Highland voices. He had been mar- 
 ried in his early life, had children, and a household 
 whose memories he sometimes, but rarely, referred 
 to. All were gone. Wife and children had now 
 lain side by side in the village graveyard for more 
 than a half-century. All his friends of early life 
 were gone as well. Most of them rested in the 
 same safe enclosure. 
 
 Now this man's life was not, you will say, remark- 
 able in anything. It was but the common life of
 
 VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 65 
 
 man in the country, only a little longer than the 
 average. You are right in this, that it was only an 
 ordinary human life, but every life is remarkable, 
 and worth studying. I had small opportunity for 
 study of this. But I went across the road and 
 joined the increasing assembly. He was lying in 
 the middle of the small room into which the door 
 opened. There was no fire on the broad hearth. 
 " It's the first time that hearth has been cold for 
 fifty years that I remember," said the landlord. 
 
 In the room were many evidences of the life he 
 had led, memorials which no one now lived to 
 cherish. An old musket and a muzzle-loading gun 
 hung on one side of the room. The antlers of a 
 moose and several of red deer were disposed as 
 conveniences for hanging household utensils. Sev- 
 eral strangely worn stones from rivers, curiously 
 twisted and involved growths of trees, brilliant bits 
 of mica and other minerals, were on the mantel- 
 shelf over the fireplace. There was no ceiling to 
 the room. The rafters were bare, and the sheath- 
 ing on the sides was nearly black with smoke and 
 time. 
 
 It was not the hour or place in which to indulge 
 curiosity, but I could not shut my eyes to the sur- 
 roundings out of which this life had gone. And 
 when some one gave me a chair I found myself 
 seated by a small solid table, on which lay one 
 book, a copy of the Breeches Bible. It was verily 
 s
 
 66 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 a family Bible. It was an edition, if I remember 
 aright, of 1595. And on the margins and blank 
 reverses of leaves, in old and faded ink, there were 
 pithy sentences written by generations of Scotch 
 Presbyterians, of whom this man lying dead here 
 was last. He, too, had gone to join the numerous 
 company, among whom are martyrs and saints, and 
 along his path, as he had travelled here almost a 
 century, he had the same old guide-book they had 
 used. It is a wonderful guide-book : good for men 
 in the rush and crush of cities, as for men in the 
 quiet, lonesome places of the up-country. 
 
 As he lay there men talked freely about him, and 
 it was wonderful to hear the affection and respect 
 which were universally expressed for him. Every 
 one had loved him, and all alike felt the loss of a 
 friend. On his farm, a hundred rods from the 
 house, was a knoll which rose gently on one side 
 some seventy or eighty feet, and from its summit 
 fell off precipitously to the river which ran with 
 loud voice over rocks below. It had been a fa- 
 vorite resting-place with the old man, and the young 
 man when he was growing old. There were stones 
 so arranged by accident that they made a seat, not 
 very comfortable, but men do not seek cushioned 
 resting-places in the up-country. He had seen suns 
 rise and suns set many times, sitting there. Much 
 of the gentleness of his nature had come from the 
 long habit of sitting there a little while now and
 
 VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 67 
 
 then and thinking. More had come from that old 
 Bible ; and the two the holy book and the calm 
 contemplation had worked together in his soul. 
 He had some favorite subjects of thought which 
 he occasionally talked about. The marvel of the 
 universe, which bothers philosophic theorists, was no 
 marvel to him, but one grand fact which he realized. 
 " I can never forget," said the village pastor, " how 
 he impressed me with a sudden exclamation when 
 we were talking about the discoveries of science 
 and the laws of nature. He said, ' What idea can 
 any man have of God who thinks, with his poor 
 eyes and inventions of glass and brass, he can see 
 into and across the whole province which his God 
 governs.' Another time he said, ' I'm a Democrat 
 with men, but with God there is no democracy, to 
 my notion. Men get to preaching equality so 
 much that they don't believe themselves any lower 
 than the angels, and imagine that the universe is 
 ruled by a Master who will exist or not, just as his 
 subjects think best.' 
 
 " ' Star-gazing you call it, do ye,' he said to one 
 who saw him sitting on his porch one night. 'Yes, 
 but I'm not looking at the stars ; I'm looking be- 
 tween and beyond them, and I see a country out 
 yonder in which there's no law of nature, no attrac- 
 tion, no force, nothing that I read about in men's 
 books, only the will of God, which is light and force 
 and law and all,' "
 
 68 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 Such expressions indicate the effect on his mind 
 of his habit of thought on the hill-top. In all times 
 men have gone up into high places to think and to 
 pray. There is no place so lonesome as the sum- 
 mit of a hill. It lifts a man out of the world. I 
 have known many men, of utterly irreverent and 
 thoughtless character of mind, awed and terrified 
 at finding themselves on high mountain peaks, and 
 afraid to stay there. I remember once, many years 
 ago, when there was no hotel on Mount Washing- 
 ton, and I had gone up there intending to stay all 
 night and see the sun rise, a sense of awe and lone- 
 someness overtook me which I vainly strove to re- 
 sist. I had passed nights alone in forests, on the 
 sea in an open boat, but this was intolerable. 
 There was a feeling, indeed, of lonesomeness, but 
 at the same time of being surrounded by an unseen 
 crowd of witnesses. So I was driven down, and 
 made my dangerous way into lower regions more 
 associated with my young humanity. 
 
 But the old man was never alone on his hill-top, 
 having in long years learned to talk much with the 
 unseen who met him there, and look earnestly into 
 space if perchance he might see there a vision of 
 superhuman beauty. And one day he saw what he 
 had waited for. It was a clear, cool summer day, 
 with a north-west wind drifting clouds across an in- 
 tensely blue sky. A neighbor who had occasion to 
 see him, not finding him at home, walked out and
 
 VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 69 
 
 up the hill just after sunset. The old man was sit- 
 ting on the rock seat, reclining on another rock 
 which supported his back and head. He had been 
 looking into the depths of the clear atmosphere, and 
 as he lay there looking, there came suddenly into 
 his vision that which eye hath not seen from earthly 
 mountain peak ; ear hath not heard from voice, how- 
 soever eloquent and musical ; heart of man, even 
 his gentle, thoughtful heart, had not conceived. 
 Who shall attempt to say with what serene and 
 solemn joy the old man had seen the blue heavens 
 opened, and the glory that is not of sun or stars, and 
 had entered into it !
 
 VIII 
 
 OVER THE HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW 
 HAMPSHIRE 
 
 IT was a fresh autumn morning when we left the 
 village of New London, high up on the hills of cen- 
 tral New Hampshire, and drove westward, without 
 any definite idea of our destination. 
 
 New Hampshire possesses all kinds of scenery 
 and soil. The northern mountain country falls off 
 into a valley which crosses the western half of the 
 State, in no very direct line, from the valley of the 
 Connecticut near Hanover to the valley of the Mer- 
 rimac near Franklin Falls. South of this valley 
 the west half of the State running north and south, 
 is a range of highlands, mostly now or formerly un- 
 der cultivation, rising in farm-lands at times to a 
 height which I believe is considerably more than 
 1000 feet above the sea. You know Mount Kear- 
 sarge, near North Conway. But few persons seem 
 to know that there is another Mount Kearsarge in 
 the State. This lies at the northern or north-east- 
 ern end of the range of highlands of which I speak, 
 and is, in part, in the town of New London, or di- 
 rectly east of it in the next town. It is a very
 
 71 
 
 noble hill, rising alone out of the cultivated rolling 
 lands. Away down in the south-western part of the 
 State a similar mountain rises in stately grandeur, 
 Monadnock by name, and thence the highlands 
 of New Hampshire fall off gently towards Massa- 
 chusetts. 
 
 This topographical account is not interesting, but 
 it is necessary to understand it if you would under- 
 stand carriage travel to the southward in the State, 
 west of the Merrimac River. You can drive from 
 the Profile House or the Crawford House to Hart- 
 ford, following the valleys of the Amonoosuck and 
 the Connecticut, without a hill of any account 
 on the road. The scenery along the entire route 
 is lovely beyond all praise, its variety infinite, its 
 beauty equal in spring, summer, and autumn. The 
 roads are, however, somewhat sandy and heavy, es- 
 pecially in dry weather. 
 
 You can also drive from either notch, Franconia 
 or the Crawford, through the eastern part of New 
 Hampshire southward to Massachusetts, over roads 
 without severe hills and with varying scenery, most 
 of it very beautiful. 
 
 But I prefer the hill roads through the highland 
 country between the Merrimac and the Connecti- 
 cut. These roads are in general good, the road- 
 beds hard, and the many fine views repay the la- 
 bor of climbing hills. Withal, horses do better, if 
 carefully driven, on rolling than on level roads.
 
 72 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 I had come from the Profile House down the 
 Pemigewasset Valley through Plymouth to Bristol, 
 thence across to New London, via Danbury, Wil- 
 mot, and Scytheville. At this last place I had 
 reached the bottom of the cross-valley which I have 
 mentioned, and thence the road to New London 
 was uphill all the way, with Kearsarge on the left 
 and behind us. New London is one of the high 
 hill-towns, and every house in the village looks off 
 many miles over fields and forests. 
 
 Turning the horses' heads to the southward, I 
 could have gone down through Sutton and Brad- 
 ford, and thence over tremendous hills to Washing- 
 ton. Turning them to the west, I should have a 
 short drive to Lake Sunapee, which lies on the up- 
 land, surrounded by low wooded hills. I had driv- 
 en both roads repeatedly. I am never tired of 
 driving the last named, for it is exceedingly beau- 
 tiful, and we chose it now. 
 
 In half an hour we were going through the dense 
 woods which skirt Little Sunapee, the upper of a 
 chain of three lakes, and of which you see only 
 glimpses as you pass along by it, until you reach 
 its outlet, which goes down into Otter Pond. Here 
 the road strikes the upper end of Otter Pond, and 
 sweeps around on its open shore for a quarter- 
 mile. The pond is charming, a mile or two long 
 and nearly as wide. The shore is clean sand and 
 the water pellucid. I have waded off on this hard,
 
 HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW HAMPSHIRE 73 
 
 sandy bottom and taken black bass with the fly, 
 casting out to right and left, while my horses stood 
 waiting on the road. 
 
 Fish Commissioners in some of Our States have 
 laboriously spoiled the fishing in a great many wa- 
 ters by introducing these black bass. Pickerel or 
 perch or pumpkin-seeds are a more valuable food- 
 fish to the farming population than black bass, and 
 black bass when placed in a pond will destroy all 
 other fish. It is only a question of time, and the 
 destruction is sure to be complete, except in large 
 bodies of water. The bass are protected by law 
 till June 1 5th, and in some States till July ist. In 
 July and August they can be taken only with prop- 
 er tackle and strong tackle, such as the farmer's 
 boy does not possess. As soon as the weather 
 and the water begin to grow cold, these fish begin 
 to find places where they hibernate. After the 
 middle of September they cannot be taken at all 
 by any one with any tackle except in large lakes, 
 and in those not after October. Here, then, is a 
 fish of very small value to a population. It is time 
 that all laws protecting them in the spring were re- 
 pealed. Let the farmer get them whenever he can. 
 There is no danger of their extermination I wish 
 there were ; but if their increase can be kept down 
 in the smaller lakes and ponds, it may happen that 
 some other fish will survive. 
 
 We drove slowly around the head of Otter Pond,
 
 74 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 then through the forest road along its rocky shore, 
 with the water lapsing over the stones and making 
 pleasant music in the sunshine. Then we came 
 out of the woods at the little village of George's 
 Mills. Here is the outlet of the pond, which falls 
 over two or three saw-mill dams in its short course 
 into Lake Sunapee. Sunapee is a large, wandering 
 lake, presenting wherever you strike it abundant 
 beauty of scenery. Bold, rocky headlands, covered 
 with timber, jut out into it, and deep shadowy bays 
 lie between them. I never yet have gotten to know- 
 ing which way is up and which way is down the 
 lake or how it stretches its chief length. Properly 
 speaking, this principal inlet, the only one of any 
 account at George's Mills, ought to mark the head 
 of the lake ; but a long, narrow arm which goes far 
 away to the eastward, along whose shores are villas 
 and cottages, and which heads at Newbury, on the 
 Concord and Claremont Railroad, always tempts 
 me to consider that the upper end of the lake. 
 However, there is no mistaking the outlet at Suna- 
 pee Harbor, into which I drove before dinner. 
 Here Sugar River, a roaring torrent (depending on 
 how high they lift the gate-way of the dam which 
 holds back the lake), plunges down a steep decliv- 
 ity and finds the valley, through which it winds 
 with clear and swift flow to Newport, and thence to 
 Claremont and the Connecticut. 
 We dined, and then decided to linger for the day.
 
 HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW HAMPSHIRE 75 
 
 I took a boat and rowed miles and miles along the 
 shores ; landed here and there in golden forests or 
 dark pine groves ; cast flies where bass, if not yet 
 gone to their winter sleep, ought to be found ; took 
 several that were not eight inches long, and were 
 put back to go to bed and grow next year ; and so 
 idled away the afternoon. The night came on cold. 
 
 Next day we rode with the carriage-cover thrown 
 back, to give us what warmth we might get from the 
 sun shining through the still dense smoke. The 
 road follows the river down to Newport ; but we did 
 not stop in that thriving town, except to post letters 
 and send some telegrams. Driving through it, we 
 crossed the valley and took the hill road to Unity 
 or Unitoga Springs. This is a lonesome but very 
 charming country-place, where are mineral springs 
 and an old hotel. We had the house to ourselves ; 
 and again the loveliness of the atmosphere, the rich 
 foliage on the near hills, and the dust of gold smoke 
 that made a canopy over us and hid the far views, 
 all tempted us to stay. I spent the afternoon in 
 the woods on the shore of a small lake a mile from 
 the hotel. I went there to fish but the only boats 
 on the lake were full of water, and there was no 
 spot on shore where I could get out a cast of more 
 than twenty feet. At that I took some perch and 
 small pickerel with the fly, but gave it up soon and 
 wandered in the woods, rich in ferns and mosses. 
 
 The next morning I sought and found a road,
 
 76 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 before unknown to me, by which to reach the Con- 
 necticut Valley; for it was Saturday, and I pro- 
 posed that my horses and I should rest over Sun- 
 day in the fine old village of Charlestown. It was 
 only nineteen miles from Unity Springs, but in 
 carriage travel we never, unless from some peculiar 
 pressure, seek to accomplish great distances. The 
 purpose is the enjoyment of the passing hours. I 
 often linger along the road and cover only two or 
 three or a half-dozen miles in a forenoon. So it was 
 along this charming road. When I reached Charles- 
 town I had driven only 108 miles from the Profile 
 House in six days. Sometimes I drive 180 in the 
 same time, taking the road leisurely and keeping the 
 horses unwearied. I have known of gentlemen mak- 
 ing 230 and 250 miles between Sunday and Sunday, 
 with travelling carriages. But I have not known 
 an instance of that kind which was not followed by 
 the sickness of one or more of the horses that did it. 
 The traveller by carriage must keep in mind that he 
 is dependent on the good condition of his horses 
 for continuous journeying, and must therefore care 
 for them with unfailing watchfulness. It is more 
 important that they should find a good stable than 
 that he should find a good inn at night. He can 
 put up with poor lodgings and food, and feel none 
 the worse for it, whereas the dumb horse must suffer 
 in a cold draughty stable, and may come out of it 
 to sicken and fail along the road.
 
 IX 
 
 THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 
 
 THE rector told me the story as we stood in 
 front of the church after morning service. 
 
 The church was almost hidden in a grove of 
 maple-trees. It stood on the brow of a hill which 
 overlooked one of the most lovely valleys on the 
 sides of the Green Mountains. The road ran 
 along the curve of the hill, in front of the church. 
 The projection on which the church stood com- 
 manded a view both up and down as well as across 
 the valley, which lay two or three hundred feet be- 
 low. The mountain sloped upward, mostly forest- 
 covered, behind the church. Across the valley was 
 a similar mountain. The pasture lots went up, here 
 and there, almost to the summit ridges. The head 
 of the valley was only a half-mile above. Down 
 from a ravine came a noble stream of water, and 
 before it fairly reached the sloping valley-land it 
 received two similar streams, the three alike falling 
 over rocky beds with much noise and white confu- 
 sion of waters before they came together into the 
 comparatively peaceful river which flowed down
 
 78 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 through rich meadow-lands and away oceanward. 
 For howsoever wild and vexed and unrestrained be 
 the youthful flow of these our mountain streams, 
 one and all alike are sure in time to reach the deep 
 and solemn rest of the great sea. 
 
 Search the world over and you will find no land- 
 scape scenery to surpass these valleys which open 
 away eastward and westward from the Green Mount- 
 ains. The one we were in was like many others I 
 had seen that spring, only these three grand cas- 
 cades at the head gave it an individuality of its 
 own. 
 
 On the lowland near the junction of the streams 
 were a substantial stone house and a group of large 
 and comfortable-looking barns and smaller build- 
 ings. This was the old home of a man whom the 
 clergyman described as a noble specimen of that 
 humanity of which, in country as in city, noble 
 specimens are rare enough to be conspicuous. 
 
 " He feared God, but feared no man," was the 
 summing-up sentence of the description. He was 
 a man of wide influence, honored, respected, and 
 loved, to whom for a half-century the old, and the 
 young, too, had gone confidently for advice and 
 help in joy and in trouble. For men and women 
 need advice as often in one as in the other. It 
 sometimes happens, in a community like this, that 
 one man holds a commanding position. If he holds 
 it steadily for a long time, so that he becomes the
 
 THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 79 
 
 trusted counsellor and confidential friend of his 
 neighbors, of all kinds, rich and poor, it is always 
 certain that that man's life is governed by devout 
 Christian principle. Others may be envied, imi- 
 tated ; others may win respect and admiration ; but 
 to become the confidential counsellor of all classes 
 and ages, to be trusted with the troubles and in- 
 vited into the happinesses of one's neighbors, it is 
 essential to be loved as well as admired. And to 
 be loved by all one must love all, not the good only, 
 but the bad as well. And there never was, and 
 never will be, a man who can love all classes of his 
 neighbors and win their love in return, except that 
 man have taken God for his example, whose spirit 
 he has to some extent made part of his own. Rea- 
 son, philosophy, experience, all affirm this. The 
 idea that purity and peace, gentleness and affection, 
 belong to what is called the religion of humanity, 
 is disproved in the history of every nation, every 
 city, every village and country community, among 
 all peoples, civilized or savage, ancient or modern. 
 There is no more exalted position among men 
 than that which was held by this man, growing old 
 among the people who loved and respected him, 
 doing good and getting good in every year of his 
 long life. The world in which he lived was small, 
 but it was large enough to occupy the energies of 
 any mind, however able. The patriarchal system 
 has never been improved on by organizing men
 
 80 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 into nations. One man in a country town can be 
 worth as much to his age and to future ages, work- 
 ing at home, as he could be in a statesman's chair. 
 This man had been the friend and counsellor of 
 statesmen. No one can measure the extent of his 
 influence for good. Its limit was not geographical, 
 for it extended far beyond the boundaries of this 
 small globe. 
 
 Much the clergyman told me of the personal and 
 direct influence his old parishioner had exerted in 
 the town, county, and State. But mostly he dwelt 
 on the extreme beauty of his personal character and 
 life, the delight with which the young people met 
 him, his great grace of manner and voice, his devout 
 and always cheerful bearing, his love of nature, his 
 keen insight into character, his marvellous breadth 
 of information and reading ; and lastly, for all else 
 was prefatory to this, he told me of the picturesque 
 death of his old parishioner, counsellor, father, and 
 friend. 
 
 All Friday and Saturday a north-east storm had 
 raged among the hills; but Sunday morning the 
 clouds went away before a stiff westerly breeze and 
 the sun poured gold into the valley. The church 
 was far away from any house one of the old sites 
 chosen in early days for people to come to from 
 various valleys and hill-sides. 
 
 The man who had charge of the church had made 
 a fire early in the morning before he recognized
 
 THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 8 1 
 
 the fact that the cold storm was over. Heavy mists 
 had rushed through the maples until nine or ten 
 o'clock, and then the warm fresh, May air took their 
 place. The interior of the church was not pleasant. 
 The air was close. Perhaps for the first time in 
 his eighty years of living, the Squire (as he was 
 called, though he had never held an office) became 
 sensible of physical suffering. So at least they 
 supposed who saw him several times lift his hand 
 to his head, and at length go to the side door and 
 open it a little way and sit down near it. After a 
 while, to the surprise of all, he noiselessly slipped 
 out of the door and did not come back. 
 
 And now for the rest of the clergyman's story you 
 will have to depend on imagination, or what we 
 may intelligently believe who know and share the 
 faith of the old man ; for there was no one out- 
 side of the church to see him until all the people 
 came out and saw him. 
 
 He sought the fresh air of the May morning. 
 There was not enough of it among the maples ; and 
 perhaps he sought the sunshine with it. So he 
 walked out of the grove towards the road -side, 
 where his son - in - law, coming late and after the 
 sheds were all occupied, had left his low carriage 
 standing while he unhitched the traces and tied the 
 horses in the grove. The empty carriage faced 
 the south ; it was on the open green, and sitting 
 in it one could see a vast prospect up and down 
 6
 
 82 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 and across the valley. The sun shone in it and 
 the wind blew over it. The old man took a seat 
 in it, and before him lay the country in which he 
 had lived and been loved, and far away yonder 
 down the valley was a range of blue hills, beyond 
 which was all the world and all the universe. 
 
 Thus far all this was a very simple and common- 
 place incident. Yes, but what seems the simple 
 and commonplace may, by reason of what shall 
 come next, be in reality the unintelligible and sub- 
 lime. The old man had always lived close to an- 
 other world. Many very dear ones had gone to it, 
 and he had never ceased to regard them as living 
 near him, nearer than if they lived in the flesh be- 
 yond those blue mountains. He never thought of 
 doubting the reality of their life. He never argued 
 about it, for his faith was above reason. Out of 
 the church came the sound of the people's voices 
 singing, and to him it seemed as if the people who 
 were under the grass behind the church as well as 
 they who were in the church were together prais- 
 ing God ; for he was, whether he knew it or not, 
 very near if not indeed on the ground where one 
 may hear the voices of both worlds. So he leaned 
 back and looked off and listened, and the wind 
 played with his white hair ; for he had left his hat 
 in the church and sat bareheaded in the breeze 
 and sunshine. Around him and above and in the 
 valley and across on the other mountain-side be-
 
 THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 8j 
 
 gan to gather appearances, if they were not reali- 
 ties. And who can say they were not realities? 
 The white mists that were passing here and there 
 among the trees near the summits, the snowy cata- 
 racts descending and shouting as they descended 
 were they water-falls and mountain-mists, or were 
 they white garments ? To your eye or mine they 
 were the remains of last night's gloom and tempest ; 
 but what were they to his eyes, looking now through 
 all things which stop our vision into the fathomless 
 depths which lie beyond? To you or to me that 
 tumultuous roar of the torrent was only the sound 
 of many waters, the roar of streams filled full with 
 heavy rains. So, perhaps, it was to him when he 
 came out and climbed feebly into the carriage ; but 
 after a little there is small doubt that he heard the 
 sounds of other waters falling from other hills into 
 other valleys, the rivers with whose cadences our 
 rivers keep some though faint and stammering 
 harmonies. For all voices of winds and water-falls 
 on earth howsoever profane be the voices of men 
 all musical and melodious sounds of nature are 
 part of the eternal song, and we should recognize 
 it if we understood that music, as, perhaps, some 
 time we may. Doubtless he heard, and though yet 
 a man old and very feeble, began to understand 
 the language in which the universe sounds its joy 
 and praise. For the bright look that rested on his 
 human face bore witness that before it became
 
 84 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 mere dead dust it had heard the sounds and seen 
 the forms of another world. How long he sat there 
 and looked and listened from the hill-side no one 
 knows. Perhaps it was to the close of the service 
 in the church. And when he heard the sound of 
 the organ, and the voices of the people singing 
 " Holy, holy, holy," the voices of the wind in the 
 trees, and the voices of the waters thundering down 
 the mountain, and the voices of the innumerable 
 host whom we never hear except when, like him, we 
 come to the entrance of the other existence, all 
 together sounded through earth and heaven, and 
 he heard them all ; and hearing, joined in the an- 
 them with them. 
 
 When the people came out of church they saw 
 him sitting on the back seat of the carriage, his 
 white hair fluttering in the wind, his hands folded 
 on his lap, his eyes apparently looking across the 
 valley at the opposite hill-side. A half-dozen peo- 
 ple went to ask him if he was sick. They found 
 him quite well ; better than he had ever been. It 
 was not v a triumphal car, nor a chariot of fire ; but 
 he had gotten into it to go a short journey, and had 
 gone, safely, happily.
 
 A DEAD LETTER 
 
 ONE evening in May, many years ago, a man of 
 an uncertain age, forty or fifty years old, perhaps, 
 walked with a steady purposeful stride on this long 
 road which leads winding through the primeval for- 
 ests up the valley to a little settlement by a lake 
 among the mountains. He carried nothing. He 
 was a stranger. As now and then he passed a house 
 the people wondered, and asked one another who 
 he was. He reached the old church which stood 
 at a crossing of the roads, the one going on up the 
 valley, the other leading to right and to left over 
 the hills. The minister's house was on the corner 
 opposite to the church. The minister, a man in 
 the prime of life, stood on the green in front of the 
 church, looking over the stone-wall into the grave- 
 yard. He was thinking how many joys and pains, 
 virtues and sins, were hidden there. He turned and 
 saw the stranger striding towards him, and greeted 
 him with a pleasant " Good-evening." The reply 
 was not gruff, but short in tone, " Good - evening," 
 and the man walked on ; but his eye caught the
 
 86 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 horse -sheds in the rear of the church, and he 
 stopped short, then sat down on the door-step. 
 
 The minister strolled towards him and asked him 
 if he was going to the village. " Not to-night," was 
 the curt, trisyllabic answer. The minister was a 
 man of much experience. He saw that there was 
 here something out of the common run of human- 
 ity in that neighborhood. " If you are not going 
 farther you will want a night's shelter, unless you 
 are going back again." 
 
 " I s'pose there's no objection to my sleepin' in 
 one of them sheds." 
 
 "My house, over there, is more comfortable; 
 come over with me and get your supper, and I'll 
 give you a bed." 
 
 " I'm grateful for your offer, but I'd ruther sleep 
 in the shed, and I don't need supper." 
 
 The minister urged his invitation, but could get 
 no reply. The stranger sat silent, not even looking 
 up or answering with his eyes. At last the minis- 
 ter gave him up and went home. He looked out in 
 the twilight frequently, and saw the man sitting on 
 the door-step. He went over and tried him again 
 with pressure, but received no response. He some- 
 how conceived the idea that the language used by 
 the queer man was affected, and not natural ; that 
 he assumed to be what he was not, an uneducated 
 man. Perhaps it was so, perhaps not ; no one ever 
 knew. For many years after that the stranger
 
 A DEAD LETTER 87 
 
 lived in the valley, became one of the valley people, 
 was known to every one, spoke to few, and used 
 very brief sentences in such conversation as was 
 necessary. He bought a tract of land, it could not 
 be called a farm, lying on the side of the mountain 
 and including a few acres of bottom land on the 
 river. There were 100 acres in the tract, and he 
 paid cash in bank notes, $80, for it. When the 
 deed was made out, the village justice, who was a 
 land-agent, asked him his name. He gave it 
 promptly Ben Layton. He built a log-house on 
 his land. The people, not an aesthetic community, 
 laughed at his selection of a site. It was up the 
 mountain-side, on a projecting knoll, the front of 
 which was a rocky precipice. The cabin stood in 
 the edge of the forest. In front of it the ridge of 
 the knoll was covered with low brush, mostly huckle- 
 berry bushes. A mountain stream came down a 
 ravine behind the cabin and descended swiftly at 
 one side of the knoll. A rough pathway, in time 
 worn by his use, led from the cabin across the 
 brook and down by the watercourse to the few 
 acres of meadow-land on the river bottom. A for- 
 est road, little else than a logging road, among 
 rocks and stumps, went from the meadow down 
 two miles to the main road up the valley. From 
 below you could see the cliff, and the low bushes 
 covering the ridge, and the dark forest from which 
 it projected, but you could not see the little cabin
 
 88 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 which stood under the trees. From the cabin door 
 the view was one of unsurpassed beauty. The val- 
 ley beneath, widening to hold a lovely lake two 
 miles long, closing again where the mill and the 
 store and the post-office and the half-dozen houses 
 formed "the village, "widened again beyond to the 
 level where the church stood, and then went down- 
 ward into immeasurable distance. The door opened 
 to the west. When the sun was setting in June 
 and July it went down in that remote distance, and 
 the glory that filled the valley was like the light 
 coming earthward from the celestial city. 
 
 Years went on. At first there was much curios- 
 ity about this strange arrival ; but it passed. He 
 became a recognized inhabitant. His strange char- 
 acter was more a matter of imagination than of 
 known fact; for he seldom spoke to any one, and 
 in those brief sentences which were necessary to 
 his procuring the means of life he spoke as sensibly 
 as any man in the valley. Oddly enough, he would 
 sometimes exchange some little talk about the 
 weather, or his health, or other commonplace sub- 
 ject, with the minister, but with no one else. And 
 the minister was the only man who ever went twice 
 to the cabin on the cliff. He had a settled convic- 
 tion that this man had a soul, not disturbed by any 
 errancy of faculty, which was worth looking after. 
 And he looked after it for thirty or more years, buf 
 confessed in the end that he had never found it
 
 A DEAD LETTER 89 
 
 To the people the cabin was simply " Ben's cab- 
 in," and as years went along and young people came 
 to exist who had not been there when he arrived, 
 a stranger, he became Old Ben, a harmless semi- 
 lunatic, who raised potatoes on his bottom-land, 
 killed and ate woodchucks and all kinds of beasts 
 of the field and forest, fished a great deal, but most- 
 ly wandered around in the woods and along the 
 streams, silent and thoughtless. 
 
 Was he without thought ? Who knows ? Some- 
 where in the world perhaps there was one, perhaps 
 there were many, who could have told what Ben 
 had to think about. No one in the valley knew. 
 He never read a newspaper or a book, never went 
 to a public gathering, never voted, never was seen 
 at church. He grew old. The minister grew old. 
 All the people were growing older, many very old, 
 as is the custom in city and country with all our 
 family of man. 
 
 It was six o'clock of a July evening. A group of 
 a dozen or more men stood on the porch of the 
 store wherein was the post-office. The semi-weekly 
 mail had arrived, and this group was regular at that 
 hour. The minister sat in his low buggy under the 
 shadow of a great Balm of Gilead-tree. The doctor 
 drove up in his buckboard and stopped by the side 
 of the minister. This was the time when the group 
 at the post-office exchanged the news of the neigh- 
 borhood, which meant a section of country three
 
 90 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 miles down and five miles up the valley, and includ- 
 ed scattered clearings on the hills. The doctor, 
 when he happened to be there, answered questions 
 about the sick, and the intelligence he gave was 
 carried in various directions, radiating to outlying 
 homes, where all were sincerely interested in it. 
 
 "Doctor," said a man whose home was three 
 miles away, " I shouldn't wonder if somethin's the 
 matter o' Old Ben. I ain't seen him now it's a 
 week or more, and I ain't seen smoke coming out 
 of his chimeney for two days." 
 
 " Why haven't you gone up to see him ?" 
 
 " Wall, it's somethin' of a climb, and a long way 
 around, and Ben don't like company, and I've been 
 purty busy hoein' potatoes, and I thought o' goin' 
 up to-morrow." 
 
 " You might better have gone up to-night instead 
 of coming down here. Does any one know whether 
 Ben has been down the valley lately ?" 
 
 " I seen him, lemme see it was Monday a week 
 ago he was fishin' on the big rock. Hain't any of 
 you fellows seen him sence then ?" While they 
 were, one and another, saying " No" to this query, 
 the postmaster came to the door with a letter in 
 his hand. 
 
 " Here's a letter for Old Ben. What had I better 
 do with it ?" The people closed around the post- 
 master. Here was an incident. A. letter to any 
 one of them would have been a matter of general
 
 A DEAD LETTER 91 
 
 interest, but a letter to Old Ben was a startling 
 fact. 
 
 " It's come at last," said one. 
 
 " Yes, it's come at last," said another and an- 
 other. 
 
 "As long as I've been postmaster and that's 
 been how many years, boys ? as long as I can re- 
 member, Ben has come every Saturday and asked 
 if there was a letter for him. Sometimes he came 
 twice a week, sometimes every day for a while. 
 There ought to be something important in it, and 
 he hasn't been here now for more than a week. 
 He's been waiting more than twenty years for that 
 letter, and it's come at last." 
 
 This constant application of Old Ben for a letter, 
 persistent, though vain, for months and years, was 
 a known fact to all the people ; but it had long been 
 set down as only another indication of his lunacy. 
 Before sunset pretty much every family in the valley 
 was talking about it, and saying, " Old Ben's letter 
 has come at last." 
 
 The letter passed from hand to hand ; one and 
 another wondered who had written it. The minis- 
 ter and the doctor were conversing and had not 
 heard the postmaster's questions. But they were 
 talking about Ben. When the postmaster repeated 
 his inquiry, the minister said : 
 
 " Give me the letter. I will take it to him. I am 
 going out to see him."
 
 92 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 The sun was just above the far horizon when 
 the minister reached the end of the narrow rocky 
 road on the bottom-land, and tied his horse under 
 a rude cow-shed near the bars of the pasture lot. 
 It was a good half-mile from this point, by the wild 
 path up the side of a brawling stream, through 
 primeval forest, to the level of Ben's cabin. The 
 minister knew his way. He had been at Ben's 
 cabin not a few times. There was no house or 
 cabin or habitation of man within many miles that 
 he had not visited often. But he had never been 
 here at this hour. The sun had gone. A mass 
 of clouds hung across the valley from mountain to 
 mountain, and all were aglow with crimson light. 
 The country below the arch of fire was lit with a 
 golden lustre which came flooding up the valley 
 from the clear sky on the horizon. Above all was 
 crimson, below all was gold. Turning his back to 
 the miraculous view, the minister struck the cabin 
 door with his knuckles two or three times and 
 waited. A robin in a tree near by sang out boldly. 
 A thrush poured forth a flood of melody, and an- 
 other lower down the hill answered him. No sound 
 came from within the cabin. The minister knocked 
 again and waited. While he was waiting he heard 
 a step, and turning saw the doctor coming along 
 the path around the corner of the cabin. He was 
 not surprised. They two were in the habit of meet- 
 ing on such errands at all hours of the day and night.
 
 A DEAD LETTER 93 
 
 They went into the cabin. It was only one room, 
 eighteen or twenty feet long and fifteen wide. All 
 of one end was occupied by the heap of rough 
 stone which formed the chimney. Along the side 
 was a low, broad bench, which did duty for a bed. 
 There was little furniture, but everything in the 
 room was clean and neat. In, or on, the bed lay 
 the tall form of a man, motionless. As the two 
 approached him he made no sign. His eyes were 
 open. 
 
 " Is he dead ?" asked the minister. The doctor 
 laid his hand on the man's forehead, and answered : 
 
 " No, he is living yet ; but," he added, after a 
 little, " he is near the end." 
 
 The same thought was in the minds of the two 
 who sat by the side of the bed : " Who is this man 
 that lies here dying alone in the forest?" They 
 had time to think, for the twilight passed into 
 night, and dark night, with clouds and rising wind, 
 and the trees began to utter strange sounds, but 
 there was no sound from the lips of Old Ben. A 
 whippoorwill suddenly called with his clear, rich 
 voice from the peak of the cabin, and a dozen or 
 more answered from the woods below. The sounds 
 of nature are innumerable in the night-time in still 
 weather, and when the wind blows the forest is 
 filled with voices in a thousand tones. Some are syl- 
 labic utterances, shouts, calls, and answers ; others, 
 long notes of delight or of pain. It made the si-
 
 94 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 lence of the cabin most solemn and impressive to 
 hear the turmoil and tumult in the outer world. 
 And it was the more oppressive to the two watchers 
 in that he who lay there dying held a secret on 
 which the silence seemed to be placing a great 
 black seal ; for, to say truth, they had within the 
 past thirty years asked each other countless times, 
 " Who is Old Ben ?" To the people not given to 
 much thought the question had long since lost in- 
 terest. To them, reading, scholarly men, it had 
 continuous and increasing attraction as an unsolved 
 problem. They asked it now, one of the other, 
 with their eyes. 
 
 " He will never get his letter after all," said the 
 doctor, in a low voice. 
 
 " What letter ?" The words came from the lips 
 of the motionless man. Then a sudden flash of 
 light illumined his face. They bent over him. 
 " What letter ?" he said again. " Is there a letter 
 for me ?" 
 
 " Give it to him," said the doctor. 
 
 " Yes, Ben, I have a letter for you. It came by 
 the mail to-night." 
 
 "Give it to me, quick, quick, dominie, for she 
 said she said ;" he tried to lift his hand, but 
 failed. The light on his face became white, cold. 
 After a while the light reappeared in his eyes. 
 " The letter she said " he was murmuring rather 
 than speaking, and they could hear no more, for the
 
 A DEAD LETTER 95 
 
 wind thundered and the trees wailed and sobbed 
 and shrieked. For one instant his eyes seized and 
 devoured the letter which the minister held in his 
 hand, but he was powerless to take it ; and a few 
 moments later the end came, and he was dead. 
 
 Their work was done. They lit their lanterns 
 and went out, leaving the mystery behind them. 
 The forest was never so black as in the contrast 
 with their lights. The brook was a torrent, for 
 heavy showers had been passing over. Even now, 
 as they went cautiously down the narrow footway, 
 they paused several times to listen to the reverber- 
 ation of heavy thunder, or to recover eyesight lost 
 in the dazzling brilliance of lightning. 
 
 " He never got the letter after all," said the min- 
 ister, as they reached the low cow-shed under which 
 they had left their horses. " What shall we do with 
 it?" 
 
 In that part of the country in those days there 
 was small thought or knowledge of the laws of in- 
 heritance. The public administrator was unknown. 
 The people buried Ben. When they brought him 
 out of the cabin they left the door open. There 
 was nothing in it which any one wanted to steal, 
 and there was no one who had any interest in pre- 
 serving it. 
 
 The minister carried the letter back to the post- 
 master. It lay a long time in his office, and again 
 and again was brought out and handed around
 
 96 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 among the people. It was the central point of in- 
 terest in that valley for months a small folded bit 
 of paper, concerning which every man and woman 
 within five miles of the place of its deposit thought 
 and talked and guessed and wondered. Then it 
 went the way of dead letters.
 
 XI 
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 
 
 THE frequency and the various conditions of 
 country graveyards form a feature of New England 
 landscape scenery peculiar to this country. You 
 never see anything like it in any other country. It 
 is, of course, common enough in Europe to find the 
 old church surrounded by the church-yard. But 
 our graveyards are very much more frequent with- 
 out than with churches, or any buildings, in them ; 
 and churches are far more numerous without than 
 with graveyards near them. 
 
 Most of the country graveyards are lonesome and 
 mournful-looking places, often far away from any 
 houses, frequently showing no indications of care 
 nor any footprints of visitors. In and near the 
 large villages one finds very beautiful cemeteries, 
 demonstrating the existence of reverence for the 
 place of final rest. But the lonesome burial-places 
 that I pass along the road are for the most part 
 open fields, with waving grass and golden-rod, and 
 often thickets of brush, but without trees. This 
 must not, however, be taken as evidence of forget- 
 7
 
 98 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 fulness of the dead, or intentional neglect of their 
 graves. It proceeds simply from the fact that no 
 one has suggested to the people the idea of com- 
 bining effort to make the graveyard a place of 
 beauty as well as of repose. It is in fact part of 
 that lack of education in love of beauty which pre- 
 vails among laborious communities, with whom life 
 is a very constant struggle, whose days are none 
 too long for the earning of a livelihood. True, it 
 needs but an instructor to teach such communities 
 the utility and money value of beauty, and show 
 how the labor of the farm may produce beauty with 
 profit. Doubtless after some more generations the 
 education will come. 
 
 Meantime these desolate -looking burial-places 
 contain abundant evidence of the refinement of 
 mind which characterizes the country population ; 
 the deep sentiment which in human history accom- 
 panies the highest civilization. For if you desire 
 to find communities in the largest measure com- 
 posed of true gentlemen and gentlewomen, you are 
 not to seek them in cities, nor in that section of 
 city population sometimes called "society," but 
 among the hills, in the up-country, where lives have 
 grown old and generations have succeeded genera- 
 tions, far removed from the ambitions, the rivalries, 
 the passionate collisions of the cities. Here are 
 very kindly hearts, rejoicing in one another's pros- 
 perities, sympathetic one with another's troubles.
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 99 
 
 Here slander finds no encouragement and gossip 
 has no life. Here no one tells lies about another, 
 man or woman, and when men or women sin, as 
 alas ! they sometimes do everywhere, others do not 
 enjoy talking about it, but are sorry and silent. 
 
 Doubtless there are evil-minded people in the 
 country. Their number is increasing as railways 
 bring the population into closer contact with crowd- 
 ed communities. But there remain, here and there, 
 isolated tracts of country in which a great deal of 
 the old purity of life and whole-souled love of neigh- 
 bors yet prevails. If you know what that means, 
 what it was a few years ago all over the north 
 country, you cannot look at one of these road-side 
 graveyards without recalling the scene which has 
 been visible here, as each one of these mounds was 
 heaped up. Then all the people from miles around 
 came to the funeral, and whether it were old man 
 or boy, babe girl or matron, no king had ever more 
 royal burial, for none was ever laid in vault or 
 ground with more solemn, loving, lamenting attend- 
 ance. 
 
 I have often copied and printed epitaphs from 
 these graveyards, which however rude or uncouth in 
 expression, are nevertheless honest epitaphs. There 
 is no introduction of the rivalries of society into 
 these cemeteries. Simple, unpretentious headstones 
 are here, only intended as marks of the separate 
 graves, and the inscriptions are in plain letters,
 
 100 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 affectionate memorials. It is often interesting to 
 see how frequently in the same graveyard the same 
 epitaph is repeated. When first put on a stone it 
 has attracted the eye and pleased the mind, and one 
 and another has adopted it as just the expression 
 of his or her feeling, and so it has been used on 
 stone after stone. It is not uncommon to find 
 stones which may indicate either the lack of a 
 stone-cutter in the country, or the poverty which 
 forbade employing one. These are home-made 
 stones, and in their rude simplicity they are very 
 eloquent, since you can but picture to yourself the 
 survivor, in a solitary home, working slowly and 
 patiently to carve the gravestone of the lamented 
 dead. Here is an example. I found it in a grave- 
 yard in the western part of the town of Putney in 
 Vermont. Type will not reproduce the rudeness 
 of the lettering, but will exhibit the patience of 
 the unskilled fingers which cut the characters deep 
 in red sandstone: 
 
 HER ELI E 
 S T H E R E 
 M E N S O F 
 M O S E S K E 
 RRWHODIE 
 DNOVEMBER 
 
 AGED6s
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES lot 
 
 Aside from the indications of human emotion 
 which these records furnish in ancient as in modern 
 cemeteries, they contain many curiosities of litera- 
 ture. 
 
 Mistakes in spelling, which are frequent, are of 
 course the fault of the stone-cutter. It certainly 
 was his fault in the case of a stone in the noble 
 cemetery at Charlestown, N. H., whereon the in- 
 scription was clearly not intended to suggest the 
 penance to which in old times some were occasion- 
 ally addicted. The epitaph ends thus : 
 
 ' ' His wayes were wayes of pleasantness 
 And all his paths were pease." 
 
 There is a common old epitaph, found frequently 
 in graveyards in England as well as in America, in 
 one or another form. In that same graveyard at 
 Putney I found it in this form : 
 
 "Behold my grave as you pass by 
 As you are liveing so once was I ; 
 Death suddenly took hold on me 
 And so will be the case with thee." 
 
 In a graveyard by the road-side in Charlemont, 
 Mass., I found a variation, the first lines being : 
 
 "Come all young people as you pass by, 
 As you are now so, "etc. 
 
 In that Charlemont burial-place I copied from
 
 102 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 the grave of Mr. Nathaniel Upton, who died in 
 1829, this short, sharp statement : 
 
 "Here lies my friend 
 Till time shall end." 
 
 Manchester in Vermont, one of the most beauti- 
 ful villages in the world, has a cemetery which, 
 like the village, may claim superior beauty to almost 
 any other in the north country. Wandering through 
 it, I copied this inscription from a stone marking 
 the graves of three children, who died in the years 
 1821, 1823, and 1824: 
 
 " Here in the dust 3 babes we 
 Sleep by our Father here 
 our Mother Brothers 
 Sisters dear have left us 
 alone to moulder 
 here " 
 
 And another, over a young wife, only eighteen 
 years old, who died in 1810. 
 
 ' ' Mourn not for me 
 Wipe off the crystal tear 
 Your allotted portion be 
 Like mine upon a bier. 
 Go search the earth around 
 Regard well your behaveer 
 To Jesus Christ you're bound 
 He is your only Saviour." 
 
 At Fayetteville in Vermont I strolled into the
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 103 
 
 old graveyard, and copied here and there an in- 
 scription. 
 
 On one stone I found this : 
 
 "Now, little James has gone to rest 
 With Eliza Ann among the blest. 
 Aside by side their bodies lay. 
 Till the great resurrection day." 
 
 On a stone by the side of the above : 
 
 ' ' Oh, little Lavina she has gone 
 To James and Charles and Eliza Ann. 
 Arm in arm they walk above, 
 Singing the Redeemer's love." 
 
 On a somewhat large monument was a photo- 
 graph, or perhaps it was a daguerreotype, set deep 
 in the stone, and under it the familiar old epitaph 
 before mentioned, with, however, a stanza added 
 which I do not remember to have seen elsewhere : 
 
 " Behold my friends as you pass by," etc. 
 
 "What thou art reading o'er my bones 
 I've often read on other stones, 
 And others soon shall read of thee 
 What thou art reading now of me." 
 
 There is a quaint force in this, which is from an 
 1825 stone at Pittsfield, N H. : 
 
 " Ah soon we must persue 
 This soul so lately fled 
 And soon of you they may say too 
 Ah such an one is dead."
 
 104 ALONG .NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 And on another stone in the same yard I found 
 this brief sentence : 
 
 ' ' Death is a debt to nature due 
 I've paid the debt, and so must you. " 
 
 Sometimes I find hints of tragedies or romances 
 in the quiet up-country lives which have found 
 final peace under the stones. As I drove by a 
 little cemetery in Goshen, I stopped the horses 
 and read from the carriage an inscription which 
 has given me food for a thousand imaginings since. 
 I wondered what could have been the story of that 
 life which was thus published on the road-side, mani- 
 festly with intent that every passer-by should read. 
 I even had the curiosity to inquire, but found no 
 one who remembered the events alluded to. It was 
 the grave of a girl of seventeen, and the epitaph was 
 
 this: 
 
 "Dearly beloved while on earth 
 Deeply lamented at death 
 Borne down by two cruel oppressors 
 Distracted and dead." 
 
 Peace be with the child, whoever she was and 
 whatever her sorrow ! It was a lonely graveyard, 
 far away from any village, and not near any house, 
 but there was a goodly company of the sleepers 
 near her on the hill-side going up from the road, 
 and she is not alone in her rest, and will not be 
 alone in the morning.
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES log 
 
 Sometimes I have found very touching evidences 
 of the grief that comes to all human hearts alike, 
 in city and country, in Christian and pagan lands. 
 There is an affectation of sorrow in some tombstone 
 literature, but I don't think any one will imagine 
 there was not the outburst of a mother's heart in 
 the words that were on the tombstone of the child 
 named Coral. She was but fourteen years in this 
 country, and some one it could have been but one 
 when she went suddenly away, summed up her 
 agony in the words on the stone, " My dearest love, 
 my dearest love !" In a city cemetery we do not 
 fancy that the publication of one's private grief 
 seems in good taste even on a memorial stone. But 
 no one can find fault with any inscription which 
 bears evidence that it is uttered, not to the living 
 who remain, but to the dead loved one who has 
 gone on. Such inscriptions properly dedicate me- 
 morial stones. 
 
 Some graveyards, full of the graves of the old- 
 time folks, are abandoned as if forgotten. At Fran- 
 cestown, N. H., I found such a place. The stones 
 were lying or leaning down in all directions. It 
 was difficult to read the inscriptions. Brush and 
 weeds concealed graves and stones. Here are some 
 lines from the headstone of Mr. Isaac Brewster, who 
 died in 1782: 
 
 "Happy the company that's gone 
 From cross to crown, from thrall to throne
 
 106 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 How loud they sing upon the shore 
 To which they sailed in heart before." 
 
 Driving up the road from Keene, N. H., to Drews- 
 ville, I reached a little road-side inn in the town of 
 Surry, at about the time to feed my horses. As I 
 sat on the front steps of the inn, the scene, in the 
 noon of a bright October day, was not exhilarating. 
 There was no village. Across the broad road was 
 a church. The front platform was rotted, and the 
 broken plank, some standing on end, made it un- 
 necessary to ask if it was abandoned. There was 
 a graveyard a little way from it, a blacksmith's shop, 
 and a building, half town-hall and half grocery-store, 
 standing between. The graveyard, although appar- 
 ently not in use, was evidently cared for. It was 
 neat and in good order. Perhaps the church is 
 deserted because the population is less. Whatever 
 be the reason, I have rarely found a country grave- 
 yard which was better worth visiting. 
 
 There was a very large group of graves of one 
 family, the name varying, usually Darte, sometimes 
 Dort, sometimes Dart, and among them Eli, Elihu, 
 and Eliphalet. One of the little girls was named 
 Azubah. Mr. Nathaniel Darte died long ago at 66. 
 There was a blank on the stone where the year of 
 his death should have been. His headstone said : 
 
 "Dear friends don't mourn for me nor weep; 
 I am not dead, but here do sleep.
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 107 
 
 And here I must and shall remain 
 Till Christ does raise me up again." 
 
 Doubtless he was a resolute man, in death as in 
 life. Mrs. Deborah Darte, his wife, died in 1773, 
 only twenty-eight years old. She says : 
 
 ' ' Friends retire ; prepared be 
 When God shall call to follow me." 
 
 When Mrs. Darte died she left two little daugh- 
 ters, Avis and Eunice. This we know from their 
 graves, close by. They both grew up. Avis married 
 Asa Holmes, and in 1791, a young wife in her twen- 
 ty-second year, "fell a victim to death." The er- 
 rors in spelling on her tombstone must be charged 
 to the stone-cutter of the day. This is the epitaph : 
 
 "Altho" I sleep in death awhile, 
 Beneath this barren sod, 
 Ere long I hope to rise and smile, 
 To meet my savour God." 
 
 Little Avis and Eunice grew to womanhood dur- 
 ing the trying times of the Revolutionary War, but 
 did not live to see the good times of this nineteenth 
 century. For Eunice, who was only two years old 
 when her mother died, Avis being four, died unmar- 
 ried a few months after her sister in 1791, in her 
 twentieth year. Mrs. Eunice the headstone calls her, 
 that is, Mistress Eunice. I fancy she had received 
 this title, given in those days to maiden ladies, but
 
 IO8 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 not often to those as young as she, because she had 
 become the head of her surviving father's house- 
 hold. She was doubtless a fair New England maid- 
 en, lovely and loved. Was it a lover who called her 
 " friend," in her epitaph ? Or was it her father ? 
 For as we will see presently the word " friend " had 
 endearing associations in that locality, and a father 
 might apply it to a daughter or a husband to a wife, 
 according to modern French usage. Here is her 
 epitaph, literally : 
 
 " Stop gentle youth and drop a tear, 
 For my true friend lies buried here. 
 She once was innacently gay, 
 But now a lifeless lump of clay. 
 Then pity my sad overthrow, 
 Nor set your heart on things below." 
 
 When Ruel Mack died in 1812 he left this assur- 
 ance, as we find it carved over him : 
 
 "Mourn not for me, nor thus reflect, 
 
 But all your sighs and tears suppress, 
 Since God has promised to protect 
 The widow and the fatherless." 
 
 Mr. Woolston Brockway, who died in 1789, in the 
 seventy - eighth year of his age, was verily one of 
 the New Hampshire fathers. The stone record 
 says : " He left a widow and eighty-seven children, 
 grand and great-grandchildren." Of John Brock- 
 way, who died in 1 799, it is said :
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 109 
 
 " He lived a friend to all mankind 
 And died in hopeful peace of mind." 
 
 On the headstone of Mrs. Lucina Willcox, who 
 died in 1800, is a version of a familiar old epitaph, 
 before mentioned, whose peculiarity I italicize : 
 
 ' ' Death is a debt by nature due, 
 fvc paid my shot and so must you. " 
 
 Theodosha, wife of Edmund Wetherbee, died in 
 1806 at twenty-one years of age, and her husband 
 thus laments : 
 
 "Why do I mourn beneath the cross? 
 
 Why do I thus repine 
 If God be pleased to take away 
 A lovely friend of mine." 
 
 In 1802, when Benjamin Isham was laid in the 
 ground, they carved this over him : 
 
 "Pray don't lement when death is sent, 
 
 Nor fill a watery eye ; 
 It was decreed to Adam's seed 
 All that are born must die." 
 
 John Marvin went away triumphantly in 1807, a 
 soldier of the church militant who fell in the battle. 
 There is the ring of a clarion in his epitaph. If you 
 do not think so, go and read it as I read it in a 
 golden October day, with a north-west wind rush- 
 ing over the hills and sweeping the yellow maple- 
 leaves in wild and musical whirls around you in
 
 110 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 that otherwise silent burial-place, while above you 
 is the blue sky into which so many have looked 
 from these hills and valleys, and looking have gone 
 to meet their leader : 
 
 "Death, thou hast conquered me 
 
 I, by thy darts, am slain ; 
 But Christ has conquered thee, 
 And I shall rise again." 
 
 I lingered two hours in this lonesome burial-place, 
 copying quaint epitaphs : those of the Reverend 
 Zebulon Streeter and Tabitha, his consort, who died 
 in the early part of the century, of Abia Grain, of 
 Colonel William Bond, of Simon Baxter, and a num- 
 ber more which are in my note-book. Let it suffice 
 to add only that of Mr. John Redding, who died in 
 1814. It is very homely : 
 
 "The widow mourns the loss of a husband near, 
 The children of a parent dear ; 
 But still one comfort does remain, 
 The hopes that our loss is his infinite gain." 
 
 As I was coming out of the ground I was startled 
 at sight of a tall, white stone, and the legend, " Ich- 
 abod Grain died Oct. 14, 1866, ae. 82 years and 10 
 months." The spelling was not that of Geoffrey 
 Crayon, but by the side of this stone was another, 
 whereon I read : " Fanny, wife of Ichabod Crane, 
 died March 22, 1842, ae. 53."
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES III 
 
 There is an interesting old cemetery at Norwich 
 in Vermont, where I passed a rainy Sunday. 
 
 The stones of a hundred and more years ago are 
 going rapidly to decay; many inscriptions are al- 
 ready lost past all recovery ; parts of others are 
 gone. I hope there is a local historical or other 
 society which has preserved accurate copies of 
 these old records. They will always be of inesti- 
 mable value, not alone to descendants of those who 
 lie here, but to local and general historians. 
 
 It was raining, and the yellow grass was high 
 and wet ; but I forgot the dismal weather as I went 
 on from one to another old stone, and kneeling in 
 the grass studied out, sometimes copying, the in- 
 scriptions. I found several names of women, un- 
 common though none entirely new to me, such as 
 Mindwell, Thankful, Salla, Alba, Candace. 
 
 Here is an inscription from an old stone : 
 
 " In memory of Mr. Nathaniel Hatch who died with the 
 small pox at Charlestown N. H. July 3, 1776 aged (blank) 
 years. His bones were accidentally found in 1810 by men to 
 work on a turnpike between Charlestown and Walpole and 
 deposited at this place by the desire of his son Oliver Hatch 
 of this town. 
 
 Let not the dead forgotten lie 
 
 Lest men forgit that they must die." 
 
 That stone speaks of the terror which accompa- 
 nied the disease when it appeared at Number Four 
 (the ancient name of Charlestown), the hasty, un-
 
 112 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 marked burial, not in the general graveyard. It 
 may suggest, too, that Americans had many sub- 
 jects of personal thought and work and worry on 
 the 4th of July, 1776. 
 
 The small stone at the grave of Mariah Hatch, 
 who died in 1802, after living five weeks, gave op- 
 portunity to some one to defy orthography and or- 
 thodoxy and the doctrine of original sin, in this epi- 
 taph: 
 
 " Beneth a sleeping infant lies 
 To earth her body's lent, 
 More glorious she'll hereafter rise 
 Though not more inocent." 
 
 The freedom of the country stone-cutter from all 
 laws of calligraphy and orthography is exhibited in 
 an inscription which I copy line for line : 
 
 " In memory of Mrs Susannah 
 wife of Ensign Elisha Burton 
 who died in full assurance 
 of a Beter life April 27 1775 
 in ye 23d Year of her Age she 
 was an Obliging wife a tender 
 Mother & a Sincear'Christion 
 born From above she paied 
 her viset here & then Retorned 
 to Dwell with saints on high 
 where she is Ceased From 
 Every ancious Care & Joined ye 
 Geniral Chorus of ye Joy " 
 
 Evidently the last word should have been " sky."
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 113 
 
 There is something worth your philosophic study 
 in these graves, and in graves which you may find 
 scattered all over the world, which you may classify 
 as you classify birds and fish and mammals and 
 flowers, placing them together. All these people 
 died in one faith ; all are of one family. It strikes 
 me always as very odd, very unscientific, for men 
 to neglect great moral facts, and great physical 
 facts which seem to be consequences of moral facts. 
 Thousands of people swarming together periodical- 
 ly towards central points, called places of worship, 
 are as distinctly phenomena as any other physical 
 occurrences in this world. The impelling causes, 
 if natural, demand the highest attention of the phi- 
 losopher. If they are not natural, then they are 
 supernatural, and annihilate many of the specula- 
 tions of the small philosophers of our day. 
 
 What higher philosophy is there ? It is written, 
 in ill-spelled phrases but in words of wonder, all 
 over these rude stones in the up-country grave- 
 yards. " You can't read it," do you say ? Come, 
 and I will show it to you in plain letters of modern 
 cutting. For as the rain fell steadily, and the 
 clouds dragged down lower on the valley, and it 
 grew colder and colder, I was about to come away 
 from the old graveyard, when I saw the dense, dark 
 mass of a low spruce bending its branches heavy 
 with wet down to the ground. Parting the branch- 
 es, I found a brown stone, surmounted by a cross,
 
 114 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 and read the summing up of that sublime faith 
 which makes an old New England graveyard to be 
 holy land. " O JESU QUI MIHI CRUCIFIXUS ES IN 
 
 TE SPERAVI." 
 
 An interesting subject of thought is found in the 
 Christian names which have been given to children, 
 borne through longer or shorter lives, and finally 
 carved on gravestones. Whence came some of 
 these names, especially as names given to female 
 children ? Here are a few out of many which I 
 have copied in various burial-places along the 
 roads. Some are Scriptural, varied in spelling, 
 some noteworthy only for the spelling : 
 
 Vesta, Smilinda, Bezaleed, 
 
 Madona, Theodate, Phileena, 
 
 Imagene, Mitty, Asenath, 
 
 Sabrisal, Rozill, Resolved, 
 
 Alanette, Lima, Comfort, 
 
 Rocksena, Orlo, Romanzo, 
 
 Ora, Elmon, Theda, 
 
 Phene, Ede, Diademia, 
 
 Arozina, Irena, Coral. 
 
 While on this subject of names of the dead, here 
 is an illustration of names now in use by the living. 
 In a village inn in New Hampshire I found the 
 printed catalogue of a school located there, and 
 copied in my note -book the following Christian 
 names of young lady students :
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 11$ 
 
 Myrtle loline. Mary Etta. 
 
 Una Gertrude. Margaret Marilla. 
 
 Mary Adella. Lora Eliza. 
 
 Lois Ella. Franca Lydia. 
 
 Come Elbra. Fannie Mae. 
 
 Daisy Sarah. Minnie Etta. 
 
 Hattie Rose Pearl. "Lizzie Estelle. 
 
 Myrtie Kate. Mary Loraine. 
 
 Florence Genevra. Bernette Samantha. 
 
 Here is an interesting study. Doubtless in each 
 family there was a satisfactory reason for the name 
 given to the child, however strange the names ap- 
 pear when brought together in a catalogue. Fre- 
 quently a mother desires to perpetuate in her daugh- 
 ter the name of the father, grandfather, or other 
 male relative. In such cases names of men are 
 slightly transformed to become feminine in sound. 
 Several times I have been told by a mother that she 
 had named her child from a character in a book 
 which she had read, and that not liking the name 
 as found, she had altered it a little. Often a young 
 mother, full of joy and love, gives her baby the name 
 of a flower. It is not often that parents, in naming 
 children, take into thought the possible maturity and 
 old age of the child, sent on in life with a label that 
 cannot be well effaced. In a Vermont cemetery is 
 the grave of a child who lived two .years, till 1824, 
 weighted with the name Orsamealius Almeron.
 
 Il6 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 Turning over an English publication recently, I 
 read a note concerning a person who died a long 
 while ago. The writer, to verify his accuracy as to 
 the date of the person's death, stated that his coffin- 
 plate is preserved in the family residence. I do not 
 know whether this indicates a custom to any extent 
 prevalent in England, of preserving coffin-plates in- 
 stead of burying them with the dead. It may be 
 only an accidental preservation. But I am sure it 
 is not generally known that such a custom has long 
 prevailed in many parts of New England. In car- 
 riage travel I have frequently found the custom in 
 practice. I once stopped for dinner at a farm-house 
 and inn, in a village in Connecticut. We waited 
 awhile in the little parlor, which was filled with 
 family treasures in the way of curious and pretty 
 things on shelves and pictures on the walls. Among 
 the latter, framed separately under glass and hang- 
 ing in different parts of the room, were three plain 
 silver coffin-plates, engraved in the usual way with 
 the names, ages, and dates of death of members of 
 the family. This was the first instance in my ex- 
 perience of this custom, which, I learned, was com- 
 mon in the neighborhood. Afterwards I met with 
 the same custom in various parts of other New 
 England States, and it is quite likely that it prevails 
 elsewhere in the country. 
 
 Opening a drawer in my library, I happened on 
 some small wooden tablets which I found many
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 117 
 
 years ago in Egypt. One of them, for example, is 
 about four and a half inches long by three and a 
 quarter inches wide. Notches are cut in the sides 
 near one end, which is also perforated with a round 
 hole. This was for a string. On one side of the 
 tablet is carved in deep, rude letters, a Greek in- 
 inscription : SapcnroSepoe Krt KaXerog er p : " Sara- 
 poderos Kti, son of Kales, aged 48." 
 
 The same words are written in ink on the other 
 side of the wood. Here is the close counterpart, 
 1800 years ago, of the modern coffin plate. For 
 these wooden tags were attached to the mummied 
 bodies of the dead, as records to go with them to 
 the burial. 
 
 Every work of art is as much an embodiment of 
 thoughts as a written sentence or a book. To look 
 at works of art and express opinions as to their 
 merit or demerit, to criticise them, is trifling work 
 of little value. To read works of art as historical 
 and personal records is the business of the art stu- 
 dent. Here is a remarkable series of works of art, 
 made by men in remotely separated periods, which 
 evidently spring from one and the same motive. 
 While we say at once that here is an indication, 
 slight but noteworthy, of the sameness of ancient 
 and modern humanity, we are nevertheless some- 
 what in the dark as to this one common motive. 
 What is it ? We have similar, though not identical, 
 works in gravestones and monumental inscriptions.
 
 Il8 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 I do not speak of the marking by inscriptions of 
 the resting-places of the dead. That is more easily 
 accounted for. But why this custom of the ages, 
 pagan and Christian, of placing with the dead the 
 record of how many years he or she had lived ? 
 
 In the vast numbers of ancient mortuary inscrip- 
 tions which we possess, this record is of constant 
 occurrence. AURELIA dulcissima filia qua de saculo 
 recessit vixit ann. xv., M. mi. ANTIMIO vixit annis 
 LXX. JULIA PROCILLA vixit ann. xix. Innumerable 
 examples like these occur, especially in early Chris- 
 tian times. The phrase, " lived so many years," is 
 the common, often the only, inscription accompany- 
 ing the name. Often the length of the lifetime is 
 stated even to months and days. Why this custom ? 
 
 I do not attempt to answer the question. It is 
 easy to find reasons for epitaphs in general. They 
 are various, under various circumstances. Some, 
 many, are importunate appeals to the living for 
 sympathy in sorrow. Some are designed to perpet- 
 uate loved or honored memories. Not a few which 
 speak passionate grief are but sounding phrases, 
 published to deceive the people into believing in a 
 sorrow which does not exist. Many are devised as 
 sermons to the active world, and many are placed 
 only in obedience to existing custom. But I cannot 
 see clearly what has been the constant motive of 
 survivors in burying their dead with the statement 
 that he or she had lived so many years and months
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 1 19 
 
 and days. Purposes of identification do not ac- 
 count for it satisfactorily. 
 
 Professor A. C. Merriam, in a monograph upon 
 the Egyptian tags, says that of the small number 
 known there are two classes, one class evidently 
 used to direct transportation of the body from the 
 place of death or of embalmment to that of entomb- 
 ment. He gives an example of this kind of tag, 
 which reminds us of the address of a modern ex- 
 press package : " To Diospolis ; Pamontis, son of 
 Tapmontis ; from Pandaroi." The other class, to 
 which mine belong, went into the tomb attached to 
 the body. 
 
 These little wooden tags are objects of no small 
 interest. They are probably not older than the be- 
 ginning of the Christian Era perhaps belong to 
 the second century. They speak a mystery, the 
 mystery I have already indicated. Whatever the 
 motive be of recording the age of the dead, it is 
 certain that there has always been a prevalent idea 
 among men which has led to the placing with the 
 dead sometimes records, sometimes personal ob- 
 jects. In countless cases we know that this idea 
 has been an avowed belief in the immortality of 
 the soul, and the added faith in a resurrection. 
 Has a like faith, sometimes so faint as to be un- 
 confessed, led to the custom in all cases ? Did 
 those who buried the son of Kales follow him in 
 vague imagination to the world of spirit, and thus,
 
 120 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 almost unconsciously, regard his life as continuous, 
 unbroken, while they thought of this life in the 
 body as only a section off from the beginning of 
 the endless continuity ? Is there in all these in- 
 scriptions an eloquence which those who made 
 them did not clearly recognize ; which would be 
 made plain by adding the word " here ?" " Julia 
 Procilla lived here nineteen years." If that were 
 the inscription, or if that be the sense in which it 
 was carved, then it ceases to be a mere statement 
 of fact, and rises to the highest rank as a simple 
 and powerful epitaph. And it is quite probable 
 that on Christian graves this is the true intent in 
 the use of the word vixit lived. 
 
 Was Sarapoderos one of the Christians of the 
 Church of St. Mark ? Was this tablet-tag intended 
 to tell the Arab of later ages who should rob his 
 grave, and me and all others to whom the inscrip- 
 tion should come, that he passed the first forty- 
 eight years of his existence here, in what men call 
 " living," and then went to the other living, where 
 he now is and will be forever ? 
 
 That common epitaph : 
 
 "As you are now, so once was I, 
 As I am now so you must be " 
 
 brought to mind an ancient inscription said to be 
 found on a Roman tablet at Naples, "Fui non sum: 
 estis non eritis : nemo immortalis."
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 121 
 
 The similarity and the immeasurable difference 
 between the two epitaphs is manifest The phi- 
 losophy Is in comparing the human minds, 2000 
 years apart, which inscribed them on the tomb of 
 the dead. In both the idea is a message, a voice, 
 from the dead to the living. In both is the sad 
 ring of human consciousness of brief existence, 
 universal certainty of the close of this life. But 
 while the ancient ended his words with the pro- 
 foundly gloomy " no one is immortal," the modern 
 closed his with the assurance of another life and 
 the words " follow me." 
 
 In no custom of men is there more evidence of 
 the community of mind, the sameness of qualities 
 in the soul, than in the custom of placing epitaphs 
 over the dead. Nor can we, I think, find in any 
 literature more interesting illustration of the iden 
 tity of the race in all ages. 
 
 There are ancient epitaphs which are identical 
 in sentiment with hundreds to be found in New 
 England and Old England graveyards. My notes 
 contain many such. It is common enough in our 
 time for parents to record in stone their grief, as if 
 demanding sympathy in their affliction from even 
 strangers, and the passers-by of future times. " My 
 darling, my darling," were four words which I 
 copied from a child's gravestone one day; "Our 
 dear little one," from another; scores of like ex- 
 pressions you are familiar with. How like the sen-
 
 122 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 timent to that of ancient parents. At Aquileia, 
 ages ago, Aurelius and Prima, father and mother, 
 made a tomb for their little Aurelia, named doubt- 
 less for her father, and wrote on it "Aurelia, aninuz 
 dulcissima : qua vlxit In pace ann. Iff I. men. VI. 
 diebus XXIII." 
 
 They loved that "sweetest soul." "She lived 
 in peace," for they had made home peaceful, and 
 she had brought peace with her in the household. 
 They counted in memory every short year of the 
 four, every moon of the six, and they treasured 
 with devout love each hour of the twenty -three 
 days which were last in the short life of their joy. 
 Many a modern father and mother have knowl- 
 edge of the emotion which led them to carve this 
 epitaph. 
 
 And that custom of recording even the days of a 
 beloved life, ancient and modern, on innumerable 
 stones, reminds me, in passing, of an inscription at 
 Rome which went still further, thus : " Vix. Ann. 
 XIX., M. If., D. IX.: horas scit nemo " " She lived 
 nineteen years, two months, nine days, hours no 
 one knoweth." 
 
 Not alone parents to children, but husbands and 
 wives to one another, and children to parents, placed 
 in ancient as in modern times, memorials of affec- 
 tion and respect, carved on stone for perpetuation. 
 At Naples Proculus and Procillanus made a monu- 
 ment to Marcia, " Matri Sanctissimce " "their most
 
 EPITAPHS AND NAMES 123 
 
 holy mother." Somewhere, I forget where, a Ro- 
 man husband said of his wife, on her gravestone, 
 " Nil unquam peccavit, nisi quod mortua st" " She 
 never did a wrong, except that she died." 
 
 It is very rare indeed to find on a modern tomb- 
 stone a doubt of immortality. Once I copied an 
 epitaph in which occurred the distinct assertion 
 that the man who lay there believed in no God. 
 Whether he ordered the record, or another placed 
 it there without direction, I know not. I have a 
 note of a Roman epitaph, " Vixi et ultra vitam nihil 
 credidi " " I have lived, and I believed in nothing 
 beyond this life." Another of two " most sad " 
 parents over a loved child expressed despairing 
 grief in terms of bitterness : " We are cheated in 
 our votive offerings; we are deceived by time, and 
 death laughs at all our carefulness : Anxious life 
 comes to nothing."
 
 XII 
 
 FINDING NEW COUNTRY 
 
 LEAVING Franconia one may drive north or south, 
 as he pleases, until well away from the high mount- 
 ains, and then take such direction as may tempt 
 him. A magnificent drive is through Bethlehem, 
 Whitefield, Groveton, North Stratford, to Cole- 
 brook, which is on the upper Connecticut River ; 
 thence eastward across the State through Dixville 
 Notch to Errol on the Androscoggin ' thence along 
 the west side of Lake Umbagog to Upton, and 
 down the Bear River Notch to Bethel in Maine. 
 This drive, easily accomplished in a week, is full 
 of delights. It is in large part through wild coun- 
 try, but the roads are in general better than in the 
 more southern country. 
 
 Southward from the Profile House the road fol- 
 lows the Pemigewasset River and valley to Plym- 
 outh, some thirty miles. The traveller going tow- 
 ards home in Massachusetts or elsewhere in the 
 lower country, may follow the river road to Bris- 
 tol and Franklin Falls, and then go down the 
 bank of the Merrimac through Concord. Or he
 
 OX THE PROFILE ROAD
 
 FINDING NEW COUNTRY 12$ 
 
 may take a route through the middle of the State, 
 over highland country, or he may cross the State 
 to the Connecticut valley, and go southward along 
 that river. 
 
 If in leaving the mountain country he desires to 
 go nowhere in particular, only to wander along the 
 roads, he can do no better than to drive into north- 
 ern Vermont. The direct route from Franconia is 
 through Littleton, and, crossing the Connecticut at 
 Waterford, to St. Johnsbury. 
 
 By way of rinding new country, I drove from 
 Franconia to Lancaster in New Hampshire. 
 
 From Lancaster we drove across the Connecticut 
 into Vermont, and down the river. We did not 
 start until afternoon, thinking not to go beyond 
 Lunenberg Heights. That little village stands on 
 a hill, with a grand view of the Franconia and White 
 Mountain ranges, the valley of the Connecticut ly- 
 ing some four or six hundred feet below, in the 
 foreground of the landscape. The air was smoky, 
 and we could not get all the extent of this grand 
 outlook. As the afternoon was not far advanced, 
 I decided to go on westward. 
 
 If you will look at a map you will see that Lunen- 
 berg lies about forty miles south of the Canada line, 
 and due east of St. Johnsbury. Going northward 
 in Vermont you can follow up the valley of the 
 Connecticut to the Canada line by a road along the 
 river, or you can follow up the valley of the Pas-
 
 126 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 sumpsic River, from St. Johnsbury, and diverging 
 at West Burke, go north Along the eastern side of 
 Mount Annanance (on Lake Willoughby) to Island 
 Pond, and thence on to Canada. Between these 
 two routes there is no northward route through this 
 north-eastern part of Vermont. Nor is there any 
 practicable road from east to west across any part 
 of this section. The road I was driving that after- 
 noon, from Lancaster to St. Johnsbury, is the most 
 northern road in Vermont, going west from the 
 Connecticut River, across this part of the State. 
 There was a poor road once along the track of the 
 Grand Trunk rail from North Stratford to Island 
 Pond, but it has not been kept up as a summer 
 road, and is not safe. There is a mountain road 
 across from Guildhall to Burke, but it is so rough 
 that only necessity should lead any one over it 
 with a light wagon. I have only to add that I do 
 not recommend this road from Lunenberg to St. 
 Johnsbury. 
 
 Two miles out from Lunenberg the road became 
 narrow, and deep mud holes and deeper dry holes 
 were frequent. Then it became rough and rocky. 
 This is not an untravelled road. It is in constant 
 use. We met fifteen vehicles heavy farm wagons, 
 covered buggies, and others and the meeting in 
 narrow passes, among rocks or mud holes, was se- 
 rious business. I suppose the condition of this 
 road is due to the system of road-making by town
 
 FINDING NEW COUNTRY 127 
 
 tax. Lunenberg is not a rich town, is sparsely set- 
 tled, and this road, the--most northerly cross-road 
 from St. Johnsbury to the Connecticut, is used 
 more by non-residents than residents. It presents 
 a strong argument for a new system of public 
 roads used by the public. When the States utilize 
 State prison and county jail labor on road-making 
 they will have better roads, no dispute with labor 
 societies about prison labor, increase the taxable 
 value of farm property, and add to the intelligence 
 and home -loving character of the population, as 
 well as add to the population. Railroads have 
 cursed and depopulated Northern New England. 
 Good wagon roads are needed for the restoration 
 of the country. What is true of this part of the 
 country is true in many other States of the Union. 
 Three hours of the golden afternoon it took me 
 to accomplish five miles. Then we entered the 
 town of Concord. But the sun was setting, and 
 St. Johnsbury was yet sixteen miles away. If the 
 road were to be of the same sort we should hardly 
 get through at all in the dark ; so we began to 
 think of a stopping - place. Two miles on we 
 drove into a little saw-mill village at the outlet of 
 Miles Pond, famous for pickerel, and we were told 
 that there was no inn in the village, but that trav- 
 ellers were sometimes "accommodated" at the 
 house of a hospitable family, to which I drove. It 
 was the last house in the village, a small, unpaint-
 
 128 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 ed, one-story house, on the bank of the pond, and 
 the tired horses gladly stopped on the grass before 
 the door. A lady was sitting on the stoop, sewing 
 by the last of the daylight. Could they take care 
 of us for the night ? She could not say ; her hus- 
 band would be at home from the field very soon ; 
 she could take care of us, but he would have to 
 say whether he could take care of the horses. We 
 must await his coming. So we threw blankets over 
 the horses and waited. The twilight came down. 
 My rod, as always, was lying in the carriage, and I 
 put on a large white fly and went to the shore of 
 the pond. Two or three casts to get out line, then 
 a long back cast, and my fly was on a telegraph- 
 wire which was high overhead behind me and the 
 leader went into a mass of raspberry-bushes along 
 the bank which overhung the water. Telegraph- 
 lines are among the abominations of anglers. They 
 penetrate the wildest woods, and arrest one's cast 
 in the most unexpected places. I have left flies on 
 telegraph-wires all over the world. No amount of 
 experience serves to make one careful. Three suc- 
 cessive casts I left on a wire between Saltzburg 
 and Ischl. Now I put on another fly, and threw 
 it out among the stars, which were plenty and sil- 
 very in the calm depths under the lily-pads. No 
 pickerel should have been out so late, but there 
 was one half-pound fellow who was still abroad, 
 and he took the fly ; and while I was landing him
 
 FINDING NEW COUNTRY 129 
 
 our host arrived, and said he could take care of the 
 horses. So we went in, and were most kindly and 
 hospitably treated. The little house held us com- 
 fortably. We had a broiled bird, eggs on toast, 
 and abundant doughnuts, and cakes of various 
 kinds, and milk in plenty for supper. 
 
 The road was good next day through West Con- 
 cord to St. Johnsbury, where we dined, and that 
 evening we rested at Danville Green. 
 
 Danville Green will assuredly be better known 
 in future years. It is a little village on a lofty 
 piece of upland farming country, commanding a 
 majestic view. The jnost striking feature in this 
 view is the eastern horizon, which is formed by the 
 New Hampshire and Franconia mountains. Of 
 these there is scarcely a known peak which, seen 
 from this angle, is not brought out separately 
 against the sky. Thus the White Mountain or 
 Presidential Range, from Madison and Adams to 
 the Crawford Notch, and the Franconia Range 
 from the Crawford Notch to Lafayette and Kins- 
 man, are laid out in a succession of elevations, 
 while Moosilauke, at the extreme right, ends the 
 serrated horizon line. 
 
 Joe's Pond lies a mile or two to the westward of 
 Danville Green, and Molly's Pond a few miles far- 
 ther to the west, on the road we drove towards 
 Montpelier. The waters of the former flow into 
 the Connecticut, while the latter pours out in a fine 
 9
 
 130 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 stream which is one of the heads of the Winooski, 
 or Onion River, emptying into Lake Champlain. 
 
 On this outlet of Mollie's Pond is one of the 
 finest cascades in the country. The stream, which 
 has been rushing and roaring along its rocky bed, 
 suddenly plunges down the hill into the valley in 
 a white torrent. The fall may be 150 feet in height, 
 not perpendicular, but over a series of steep, rocky 
 steps. The forest overhangs it on both sides. If 
 you are driving down the valley from Cabot your 
 road passes directly in front of this magnificent 
 water-fall. Were it in Switzerland it would have 
 wide renown. On the direct road leading from 
 Danville to Marshfield the cascade is not visible, 
 though its roar comes out of the forest on your 
 right as you pass near it. The cascade is known 
 hereabouts as Molly's Falls. Molly's Falls are on 
 Molly's Brook, and Molly's Brook flows from Molly's 
 Pond. 
 
 Joe and Molly are historical characters in the 
 Coos country. Joe was a young Indian from Nova 
 Scotia who, on the practical destruction of his tribe 
 after the siege of Louisburg, drifted to the St. 
 Francois tribe, and made his home on the Connect- 
 icut where Newbury now is. He was always on 
 kind terms with the early settlers, and lived to a 
 good old age, enjoying a pension from Vermont 
 until his death in 1819. In his early days he took 
 a wife (known to the whites as Molly) who had by
 
 FINDING NEW COUNTRY 131 
 
 a former husband two sons named Toomalek and 
 Muxawuxal. The latter died. The former lived to 
 be a grief to his mother. He is described as a 
 short, broad, fiendish-looking, bad Indian. He de- 
 sired for his wife a young girl, Lewa, who preferred 
 and married another. Whereupon Toomalek, watch- 
 ing for his opportunity to kill the favored lover, now 
 the husband, saw the two sitting by their camp-fire 
 in the evening, shot at the man and killed the wife. 
 The Indians tried him by their law. Old chief 
 John, a renewed warrior, presided, and laid down 
 the law that as Toomalek had shot at the husband 
 and missed him, he had committed no crime as 
 against him ; that as he had not intended to shoot 
 the woman in shooting at the man, the occurrence 
 was accidental so far as she was concerned. So 
 they discharged him. But John lived to repent his 
 small knowledge of the distinct crimes of murder 
 and manslaughter. Toomalek shortly after killed 
 the husband in a fray, and again went free, it being 
 adjudged that he acted in self-defence. It was old 
 John who saved him again by his legal acumen. 
 
 Old John's eldest and favorite son, Pial, with 
 other young Indians, was walking across the fields 
 now in North Haverhill, when an exchange of 
 words sprang up between him and an Indian girl. 
 She whispered in Toomalek's ear, and he, turning 
 short, drove his knife through Pial, then and there 
 killing him, contrary to Indian and white law and
 
 132 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 the peace of both communities. This time the 
 whites undertook to administer justice, and they 
 did it with a queer intermingling of white and cop- 
 per-colored law and practice. The court was ap- 
 parently a town meeting, called at Newbury the 
 morning after the murder, and the judgment of 
 death was unanimous, including the Indian law that 
 the father of the murdered man must kill the mur- 
 derer. But first they sent a committee to consult 
 the clergyman, whose approval being obtained, they 
 made Toomalek sit down, and gave John a musket, 
 with which he executed the judgment of private re- 
 venge and public law on the son of Molly. 
 
 Joe and Molly were present at the execution, 
 buried the body themselves, and it is reported that 
 Molly, who had but lately wept long and bitterly 
 over the natural death of her other son, Muxa- 
 wuxal, shed no tears for Toomalek, nor was ever 
 heard to mention his name. During the War of the 
 Revolution Joe was always on the side of the colo- 
 nists ; was a great admirer of Washington ; boasted 
 of a visit he once paid to the great father at New- 
 burg on the Hudson and of a kind reception there, 
 and was known to have such permanent hatred to- 
 wards the British that he would never cross the 
 Canada line even in following moose through the 
 forests. His Indian friends could never persuade 
 him to join the St. Francis tribe in Canada, nor 
 when once they stole Molly and carried her there
 
 would he go after her. She came back and died. 
 He outlived her, and growing very old, received a 
 pension of $70 per annum from Vermont until his 
 death in 1819. When he died the Newbury people 
 did him honor, laid him in the north-east corner of 
 the burying-ground, and discharged over his grave 
 the last load which the old Indian had placed and 
 left in his gun. Says Mr. Powers ( the historian of 
 the Coos country, from whose book I have con- 
 densed this story ) : " with Captain Joe fell the last 
 of the Indians at Coosuck, that once fairy-land of 
 long-slumbering generations." 
 
 You will see that the names " Joe's Pond " and 
 " Molly's Pond" are sacred historical names. Some 
 one will be trying to change them some day be- 
 cause they are not of pleasant sound. But they 
 should stand. 
 
 We dined at Marshfield, drove on to Plainfield, 
 and instead of keeping on to Montpelier turned 
 southward, crossing high hills with far views of the 
 mountains, and reached Barre at sunset. 
 
 As I entered the village an old friend greeted 
 me. We had been together in many countries, and 
 his greeting was the salutation of peace which is 
 common in the Orient. 
 
 Why is it that English-speaking peoples of all 
 the world have none of those beautiful forms of 
 greeting when friends meet ? It is because of this 
 great lack in our language, or our customs, that
 
 134 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 travellers who have been in Oriental countries are 
 fond of using Oriental salutations. The American 
 or the Englishman, when he meets his dearest 
 friends after a long or short separation, in ninety- 
 nine cases out of a hundred asks him, "How do 
 you do ?" or " How are you ?" Perhaps he varies 
 it by saying, if surprised, " Why, John !" Lovers 
 have no more tender phrase when they meet in the 
 presence of friends than the same " How do you 
 do?" The physician or the clergyman coming to 
 the bedside of the sick man or woman, like all 
 other friends, can only ask, "How do you do 
 to-day?" or, "How do you find yourself?" or 
 some other vague inquiry always beginning with 
 "how." 
 
 It is otherwise in parting. We have good old 
 phrases of benediction which we use, whether we 
 mean them or not. Why not some like phrases for 
 salutation in meeting, like the old Romans, " Good 
 health to you f or, best of all, that salutation which 
 has been used in the Orient with uninterrupted suc- 
 cession for thousands of years, "Peace be with 
 you." 
 
 What were the revisers of the Old Testament 
 about when they failed to revise the King James 
 translation of that salutation repeatedly occurring ? 
 When the prophet met the woman whose boy lay 
 dead at home, he did not greet her in the vague 
 phraseology of the Englishman or the American,
 
 FINDING NEW COUNTRY 135 
 
 " Is it well with thee ? Is it well with the child ?" 
 Nor did she answer with that cold word "Well." 
 He said, " Is it peace with thee ? Is it peace with 
 the child ?" and she said, with infinite calm and 
 trust, " It is peace."
 
 WHAT boys those were I Looking about one in 
 the Christmas-times in New York, and seeing the 
 crowds of young people who are at home from 
 school for the holidays, it is impossible not to con- 
 trast the boys of to-day in the city with those boys. 
 This is not the pessimist's way of always thinking 
 the old times better than the latter days. It is no 
 imaginary contrast. It is simply the demand of the 
 modern boy, which he makes on you wherever you 
 meet him, to examine and pronounce judgment on 
 him. He challenges your opinion. His mother 
 sent him out into the street to challenge it. He is 
 a work of art, and as such is set before you to be 
 admired, with the expectation that you will look at 
 him and pronounce on the quality of the art which 
 has produced him. These little specimens of young 
 humanity, with tight little trousers, tight little coats, 
 tight little white chokers around their necks, little 
 canes in their hands and little thoughts in their 
 heads, are correct representatives of the boys that
 
 BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS 137 
 
 some modern mothers are bringing up for the next 
 generation of men. 
 
 It is a melancholy fact, which no father who has 
 daughters can fail to recognize, that the girls of to- 
 day are in education and personal force of charac- 
 ter much ahead of the boys. There are plenty of 
 hearty, bright, brilliant, sensible girls. Society has 
 not spoiled them, with all its frivolities. 
 
 Society is an essential part of this life. Those 
 who abuse it with wholesale sweeping denuncia- 
 tions do not know what they are talking about. 
 The purpose of education and life is happiness 
 here and hereafter. She who has been so educated 
 that she is able to be happy and hopeful and to 
 confer happiness and hopefulness on those around 
 her is well educated. This life and the other life 
 are closely interwoven, and it is by no means nec- 
 essary to abandon this life for the sake of getting 
 ready for that. The duties of this life are present 
 duties, and whatever be our social surroundings, 
 whether in the informal associations of country soci- 
 ety or in the settled formalities and splendid deco- 
 rations of city society, there are duties which men 
 and women owe to one another. Those who in- 
 veigh against the evils of society would do well to 
 measure the certain results which would follow ,the 
 abolition of that which they decry. Our civiliza- 
 tion rests for its support on the splendors and lux. 
 uries of life far more than on the utilities. Our
 
 138 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 charities, hospitals, missions, all derive their sup- 
 port from the wealth which is the product of our 
 social system. No mechanic, mason, carpenter, 
 hod-carrier, artisan, tradesman, whatever his em- 
 ployment, whatever he produces or sells, would 
 have a dollar to give to the church or the poor but 
 for the fact that the rich wear rich apparel, live in 
 gorgeous houses, give brilliant receptions, enjoy the 
 splendor of modern social life. 
 
 In this social life, whether its brilliancy be that 
 of intellectual gatherings, or of dress and formality, 
 woman has right to rule supreme. There is no 
 work of art on earth, ancient or modern, more 
 beautiful, more worthy of admiration, than a well- 
 dressed woman. If she were not a thing to be ad- 
 mired, the saint of old time, to whom were given 
 visions of heaven, would not have likened the 
 Holy City to a bride adorned. The pathway to the 
 better country does not necessarily lie through the 
 waste places of this life. Many saints there be 
 who have walked it among all the splendors and 
 allurements of society. Mostly, I think, women, 
 not men. And in our own day, it is undeniable 
 that the young women in society are in general the 
 intellectual superiors of the young men. Some 
 parents look solely for wealth in selecting husbands 
 for their daughters; but I imagine these parents 
 are more rare than is commonly believed. And it 
 is certainly true that many judicious fathers and
 
 BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS 139 
 
 mothers, recognizing the ability of their daughters 
 to be blessings and adornments of homes and of 
 society, are sadly occupied in measuring the visible 
 inferiority of the young men whom they see and 
 estimate side by side with their daughters. 
 
 What boys those were ! Can these little fellows, 
 with tight collars and cravats at fourteen, ever 
 make such men as those boys made! There is 
 something wholly inconsistent with development 
 of intellect in a tight stand-up collar around a boy's 
 neck. Freedom of physical action is certainly es- 
 sential to freedom of mind and thought. Fashion 
 imposes on men in society formalities of dress. 
 The rules of society are proper and obedience is 
 necessary ; otherwise society would degenerate and 
 license destroy its system, which must be preserved. 
 Therefore men in society must dress as the rules 
 require, however ill be the taste which has made 
 the rules. But boys are not in society ; and it is a 
 fearful blunder which mothers make in dressing 
 their boys as if they belonged to a social system, 
 or according to the rules of any such system, thus 
 teaching them to demand such dress as they grow 
 older, and to regard it as a governing consideration 
 in life. Boys who dress in the style of some ab- 
 surd-looking slips of humanity one meets nowadays 
 can't possibly be boys. They are little automatons, 
 mimicking the solemnities of mature life, carica- 
 turing the sober realities of society.
 
 140 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 What boys those were! I say it again. The 
 memory of them comes with the fresh brilliancy of 
 a December Christmas wind out of the north, 
 sharp, clear, with the sound of sleigh-bells and 
 shouts. Are there any like them now? Doubt- 
 less plenty ; but the modern schools, with gymna- 
 siums for training the physical system, do not seem 
 to turn out one in three, or one in a dozen, such 
 boys as used to be in any high-class school in the 
 country. The contrary is asserted. I don't be- 
 lieve it. Never did the system of old Greece, 
 which classed athletics among the three great 
 branches of education, make more noble speci- 
 mens of young strength than our country schools 
 did in old times, and perhaps now do. But these 
 are never the boys that wear tight things around 
 any of their muscles above all, never boys that 
 wear stiff stand - up collars habitually. To be a 
 great boy is easier than to be a great man. It 
 comes naturally with pure association, liberal use 
 of muscles as well as mind, freedom of feeling 
 which comes from freedom of clothing. It is easy 
 to spoil what would be a great boy if let alone. 
 Put him up to thinking much of how he looks when 
 dressed to go out, and the boy will turn out next 
 to worthless as a boy among boys, and have poor 
 prospects as a man. 
 
 Perhaps I mistake those boys of old time, and 
 the glow which invests them is the deceitful light
 
 BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS 141 
 
 that memory sometimes creates like a halo around 
 the things we loved long ago. But there is no 
 error in the estimate one must make of a large 
 class of boys in modern cities. There is good 
 stuff in them, but the vigor and force is taken 
 out of it between the ages of eight and fifteen. 
 They have by that time no independence of char- 
 acter ; are, at their best, imitators, without self-re- 
 liance. It is a bad thing to make a boy's ambition 
 to be measured by what other boys do, his ideas of 
 taste controlled by other boys' ideas, his language 
 and conversation reduced to the slang of a set of 
 boys. 
 
 If you have no other guide in conducting your 
 boy's life, good mother, take this : Give him some- 
 thing to remember ; keep him from all that he would 
 in mature life wish to forget. There is no more 
 precious possession to the man than memories of 
 boyhood. They grow more precious with advan- 
 cing age. If it be possible, forbid in your boy's 
 life that he shall ever look back from the serious 
 years of maturity and have to say to himself, 
 "What a little fool I was in those days!" All men 
 remember follies, and the honest follies of a boy 
 are pleasant memories, that one can laugh at and 
 remember joyously. But deliberate follies persist- 
 ed in from year to year, through all the sunniest 
 years of life, are not pleasant to look back at ; and 
 saddest of all they will seem if the boy-man shall
 
 142 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 have to say, " I was a foolish boy because my par- 
 ents made me one." 
 
 All this because of the group of country boys we 
 saw at play in front of a school-house on the road- 
 side. They were stout, healthy, happy boys, and 
 some of them will be men of mark hereafter.
 
 XIV 
 PILGRIMAGE ENDED 
 
 IT is a windy night. Elsewhere it might be 
 called a tempestuous night, but up in the north 
 country of New Hampshire we are used to high 
 winds, and this is only a gale, not a tempest. The 
 forest is uttering thunderous voices, such as it al- 
 ways utters when arguing with the wind. You can 
 find resemblances to any and every sound you ever 
 heard in these forest sounds. Low voices in va- 
 rious tones mingle with the roar. Sitting here in 
 the cabin, you will think them like whatever your 
 mind happens to be directed towards. I have been 
 reading a book ; therefore I hear the sound of the 
 surf on a reef, and the whistling of the wind through 
 the cordage of a ship, and the cries of people in 
 many tones. I have been reading an account of a 
 traveller landing from a ship at the port of Jaffa 
 ancient Joppa the seaport of Jerusalem. They 
 call it a port, but it is no port. The steamer anch- 
 ors in the offing. If the wind be off shore you 
 can go safely enough through the break in the reef ; 
 if the wind be otherwise, and be only a little fresh,
 
 144 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 the landing is difficult, sometimes impracticable. 
 Several times I have gone through the reef, and 
 fought my way up the steps into the crowd of 
 Turks, Arabs, and infidels on the shore street of 
 that wretched Jaffa. The last time that I was there 
 I did not go ashore. The day was memorable, and 
 comes back in memory whenever, as now, I read of 
 the experience of travellers on their way to the Holy 
 City. 
 
 We were coming down the coast of the Levant 
 on the Austrian Lloyds' steamer. The only first- 
 class passenger on board besides ourselves was a 
 Greek caloyer ; but the deck of the ship was loaded 
 with hundreds of poor pilgrims on their way to 
 Jerusalem a crowd of men, women, and children 
 of various nationalities, mostly showing signs of ex- 
 treme poverty, and all very far away from godliness 
 in the matter of cleanliness. It was difficult to 
 make one's way along the deck without treading 
 on arms or legs or children. Why do those poor 
 pilgrims always take such crowds of children to 
 Jerusalem ? 
 
 In the cabin all was pleasant. The steamer was 
 of the first-class, and her table was of the best I 
 ever saw at sea. It was in consequence thereof 
 that I made the acquaintance of the priest, our 
 only fellow-traveller ; for at the dinner-table we sat 
 down only five persons, of whom two were the cap- 
 tain and the ship's surgeon ; and when I praised a
 
 PILGRIMAGE ENDED 145 
 
 dish, the latter spoke, saying, " We are proud of 
 our table, and think we have the best cook but one 
 in the Austrian Lloyds' service." 
 
 " Yes, he is certainly a great cook ; but who is 
 his superior?" 
 
 " His father, who is one of the oldest cooks in 
 the service, and has six sons, all cooks in the serv- 
 ice, and two daughters married to cooks in the 
 service." 
 
 " A valuable family to the service," said a re- 
 markably gentle and yet strong voice at my side, 
 and I turned to look at the man who had just taken 
 his place by me. He was a man of forty or forty-five, 
 full six feet high, wearing the elevated black cap 
 of the Greek Church. His face was singularly at- 
 tractive and impressive, the features sharp cut, fore- 
 head high, complexion surprisingly white and pure, 
 eyes dark, full of life and full of benevolence. It 
 was a face to fall in love with. The expression of 
 his eye as my glance met his was winning, and his 
 whole appearance that of power and saintliness 
 combined. Somewhat such a man I think was the 
 Apostle John. It is rare to meet one whose look 
 impresses you thus with the thought that this man 
 is not of the world, worldly. I had prejudices 
 against Greek monks and priests, for most of those 
 that one meets in Egypt and Syria are ignorant, 
 absolutely dirty in dress and person, and generally 
 objectionable ; but of this man I said at once he is
 
 146 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 a typical Caloyer, raXoe yepoc a " beautiful elder " 
 in the Church ; and with a suddenness, of which I 
 doubt not you remember examples in your experi- 
 ence among men, I yielded myself to the charm 
 which drew me towards him. It soon appeared 
 that he was a man of much learning as well as 
 much experience among men, and our conversa- 
 tion, commenced at the dinner-table, continued on 
 deck until late in the night. 
 
 Thrown by accident on a steamer loaded with 
 Greek pilgrims, he found work to do, and he did it 
 here as everywhere, on his Master's service. He 
 seemed at once to know the case of every family 
 and group among them ; and though many were 
 uncouth and by no means gentle in their manners, 
 he was rapidly recognized by all, or most of them, 
 as a good pastor, and was unwearying in his atten- 
 tion, especially to the sick and suffering, of whom 
 there were not a few. When we came out from 
 Beyrout to run down the Phoenician coast, we met 
 a sirocco, and there is no storm more trying. Hot 
 and fierce, the wind seemed to cut off your breath 
 as with a red-hot sword, and all day long the blue 
 seas went over the ship, half-drowning the misera- 
 ble pilgrims who lay huddled in masses all over the 
 deck. It was a brief luxury of rest when we ran 
 under the lee of Mount Carmel and dropped anch- 
 or for an hour or two at Haifa. 
 
 It is memorable now, in connection with what
 
 PILGRIMAGE ENDED 147 
 
 afterwards occurred, that we talked that evening of 
 pilgrimages. He was making the pilgrimage. He 
 had never seen Jerusalem, and was now devoutly 
 going to the Sepulchre. Across the plain of Es- 
 draelon, which touches the sea near Haifa, we 
 looked at the huge slopes of Lebanon, and I tried 
 to point out to him, among more distant mount- 
 ains, the peaks of Tabor and Gilboa, the hills that 
 are around Nazareth, and the dark summit of Lit- 
 tle Hermon, which looks down on the blue beauty 
 of the Sea of Galilee. And then we talked of pil- 
 grims in old times, in all the ages, and spoke es- 
 pecially of the exceeding bitterness of their disap- 
 pointment who, after long journeys across Europe 
 and over the sea, reached the gates of Jerusalem, 
 and when the Saracens forbade their entrance, lay 
 down and died under the very walls, never having 
 seen the Sepulchre. 
 
 The sun went down in white dust, the desert 
 sand of Arabia flying over the sea before the siroc- 
 co, and the ship again plunged into the face of the 
 tempest. In the morning at daybreak we anchored 
 in the roadstead off Jaffa, two miles or so from the 
 shore, and the first fierce jerk of the ship at her 
 chain threatened to hurl everything out of her. 
 What an anchorage that was ! A tremendous sea 
 was running. Under ordinary circumstances the 
 captain would not have anchored, but would have 
 gone on with his passengers to Alexandria. This
 
 148 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 is sometimes, often, the luck of those who seek to 
 reach Jerusalem. But it lacked only a few days of 
 the Greek Easter, the great day of the pilgrimage, 
 and if carried on to Egypt, these hundreds of poor 
 pilgrims would miss the chief object of their long 
 journey. So the good Austrian officer anchored, 
 and fired cannon to tell the Jaffa boatmen that it 
 was for them to decide whether they would take the 
 risk of coming out through the surf on the reef. 
 We rolled and plunged and waited. About nine or 
 ten o'clock, the wind seeming to draw a little more 
 directly off shore, the shore boats began to appear 
 and disappear, rising and falling on the great waves 
 as they came towards the ship, and at length were 
 alongside. It was a fearful business to get into 
 them, the steamer rolling over almost on her beam 
 ends at every sea. With long delay and much dan- 
 ger, boat after boat received a load of pilgrims and 
 luggage, and one after another went tossing shore- 
 ward and safely passed the opening in the reef. 
 
 On board were left fifteen or twenty timid wom- 
 en and men who had not dared the fearful descent 
 of the ship's ladder, and my friend, the priest, who 
 had remained to the last to give them all his aid 
 and comfort. There was one queer little old wom- 
 an who passed the time in alternate shrieking, 
 laughing, and crying. Ten times she essayed the 
 ladder when the ship rolled to port, and rushed 
 back or tumbled back on deck when the angle
 
 PILGRIMAGE ENDED 149 
 
 changed and the bottom step was ten feet above 
 the boat. The priest gently encouraged her, but 
 in vain, and at last a sailor, watching his chance as 
 she once more shrieked and fell back, seized her 
 in his arms, rushed down the steps and tossed her 
 like a bundle into the boat. She was the last ex- 
 cept my friend. I took his hand, and we parted 
 with many Oriental words of peace. He reached 
 the boat, took his seat on a bench in the middle, 
 and as she swung across the stern of the ship on a 
 long wave he bared his noble head, and with re- 
 peated waves of our hands, and words lost in the 
 storm, we exchanged the last salutations. He looked 
 like a pastor with his flock around him. Calm, 
 silent, his forehead swept with the fierce sirocco 
 wind which he was facing, I followed them with 
 my eyes, now on wave tops, now wholly lost to 
 sight. At length I used my glass a fine marine 
 glass it lies here to-night on the cabin table and 
 with that I kept them steadily in view. The reef 
 was a white wall of foam dashing high into the air. 
 As they approached a narrow opening where a 
 darker sea indicated the passage, the waves grew 
 shorter. Their boat appeared and vanished in 
 quick succession. " Are they past the opening ?" 
 " I cannot tell ; I think they are just in it. The 
 sea is awful." And the words were not uttered 
 when in the field of my glass I saw a terrible vision. 
 The boat was lifted on a mass of water, it rose high,
 
 150 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 and then suddenly I saw the bow thrown up, a 
 hideous confusion of men and women and children 
 among oars and baggage were hurled into the white 
 surf on the reef, which leaped into the air trium- 
 phant, and I saw no more of them ; only the upturned 
 boat, floating, and tossed now and then into full 
 view, swept northward along the shore, and finally 
 went on the sandy beach in the breakers a half- 
 mile north of the northern wall of the city. 
 
 So seeking Jerusalem that is below, before his 
 pilgrim sandals had yet touched the soil of the be- 
 loved land, my newly-made and newly-lost friend, 
 the good priest, found Jerusalem that is above, 
 the mother of us all. 
 
 I have thought of him a thousand times since 
 then, most frequently when in the forest on windy 
 nights. In the roar of the mountain storm which 
 rages around the cabin, mingled with the shrieks of 
 the forest trees writhing and intertwining their giant 
 arms, I recall that pale, calm face and commanding 
 form as the boat sweeps shoreward on the great 
 seas of the Mediterranean; and while I see him 
 wave his hand, I can hear again and again and 
 again, as I could not then hear what I knew he was 
 saying, Salame, salame, salame, "Peace, peace, peace." 
 And I know that in every tempest, on land or sea, 
 the war of the elements is but a little agitation 
 which to our weak sense seems great. The mount- 
 ain stands calm, though my cabin shakes in the
 
 PILGRIMAGE ENDED !$! 
 
 storm, and the surroundings which I have made 
 seem ready to be swept away. And the Peace of 
 Jerusalem the peace that passes our understand- 
 ing the peace whose blessing he gave me across 
 the sea when he waved his white hand to me in the 
 sirocco blast that peace is more calm than the 
 mountain, more enduring than sea and shore, and 
 abides forever in the City of Peace whither he went 
 that morning through the tempest.
 
 XV 
 NON-RESISTANCE 
 
 IT is very difficult for the honest advocate of the 
 doctrine of non-resistance to live up to his princi- 
 ples. The duty of self-defence, the divinely-or- 
 dained right of the master of the house to forbid 
 the spoiling of his goods, the self-evident law which 
 commands every one to defend the weak against 
 the oppressing strong, these are requirements which 
 a man may honestly try to ignore, but which, unless 
 he be a coward, he will never succeed in ignoring 
 when the trial of his faith comes. The sturdy non- 
 resistant, sturdy of soul as of body, who has yes- 
 terday defended a little child from the attack of a 
 dog, will to-day defend the same child from the at- 
 tack of a brute in shape of man, and to-morrow will 
 defend his country and government against ene- 
 mies. 
 
 In one of the villages through which we drove 
 yesterday was once a society called a non-resistance 
 society. Its members were men and women, good, 
 honest, well-meaning people all of them. Its history 
 was brief, but not altogether uneventful. It was
 
 NON-RESISTANCE 153 
 
 strong in its principles, but it was from time to time 
 enfeebled by the failures of its members in prac- 
 tical life ; and when at last the Civil War began it 
 ceased to exist, because some of its members 
 went to fight for the Union, and all the others en- 
 couraged them to go and rejoiced in their pa- 
 triotism. 
 
 While it existed, and indeed long before it was 
 organized, Jabez Dickinson was known in the whole 
 town as a steadfast advocate of the doctrine of 
 submission without forcible resistance. 
 
 He was the village merchant, kept the village 
 store, where he sold everything from silk ribbons 
 to tallow candles and sugar candies. He was not 
 a deacon, but he was always named and known as 
 Deacon Jabe, because there was never known a 
 man who more firmly, boldly, and consistently as- 
 serted and practiced the doctrines of the Christian 
 life. Universally loved and respected by the peo- 
 ple, old and young, he had led a long life of peace 
 and quiet, doing good and getting good. And dur- 
 ing this life he had been an unwavering non-resist- 
 ant. He was not much of a talker. He seldom 
 preached. But in the store, where it was the cus- 
 tom of the men of the community to gather, espe- 
 cially on Saturday evenings, the nickname deacon 
 had been given to him for years, and thence had 
 travelled through the community. Seldom volun- 
 teering opinions, he was often appealed to for the
 
 154 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 decision of mooted questions. And if you do not 
 know it, I can tell you that in the country store 
 there are daily discussions of questions, moral, phil- 
 osophical, religious, and practical, in which at least 
 as much average good sound sense and logical 
 power is developed as in any meeting of any of the 
 modern scientific associations, British or American. 
 Always, however, Deacon Jabe had laid down and 
 adhered to his non-resistance principles, and this 
 in the face of much provocation to think and act 
 otherwise. Many indignities he had suffered from 
 fellows of the baser sort, insults and personal 
 wrongs, always taking them meekly and without 
 resentment. In all the town there was but one 
 supporter of his radical views, and he often wished 
 he was free from that ally ; for Miss Almira Smith 
 was a cantankerous talker and fighter, doing with 
 her tongue a perpetual war, offensive and defensive, 
 while she proclaimed the sinfulness of physical of- 
 fence or defence with any other muscles or member 
 of the human body. For, after all, it is but a ques- 
 tion of muscles, and the non-resistant who forbids 
 blows with the fist is often a conscientious dealer 
 of deadly blows with the voice. 
 
 The deacon had received much and sore provo- 
 cation that week from Silas Maxwell, the town bully, 
 a fellow of powerful structure, who rejoiced in his 
 ability to whip any man in the county. And he 
 had fought many battles, not in sport, with invaria-
 
 NON-RESISTANCE 155 
 
 ble victory. My story would be too long were I 
 to recite the talk on Saturday evening in the store 
 when Silas nagged Jabez and insulted him again 
 and again, presuming, and boasting that he pre- 
 sumed, on the deacon's non-resistance, which Silas 
 said was nothing but cowardice. " He don't resist 
 bekase he daresent resist," said the bully, walking 
 across the store and helping himself to a chunk of 
 tobacco, at the same moment opening a huge knife 
 wherewith to cut off a mouthful. 
 
 Little Katie Wheeler was the deacon's grand- 
 daughter, a lovely child, the joy of his life, sole de- 
 scendant of his dead wife and daughter. Katie 
 was a sad invalid, but she had a well mind, never 
 ill, never sickly. All day long she was in and out 
 of the store, always breezy and cheery, making per- 
 petual spring-time in the life of the lonesome man. 
 Her little chair stood where in the evenings she sat 
 till her grandfather closed the door and she walked 
 home with him. Every one loved Katie even Silas 
 Maxwell, brute though he was. As Silas took the 
 tobacco in his hand, Katie sprang from her chair 
 and snatched it away from him, saying, " Silas 
 Maxwell, you sha'n't steal granther's tobacco any 
 more." The child's impulsive act and clear ring- 
 ing voice were greeted with a shout from the fifteen 
 or twenty villagers in the store. The act, the word 
 "steal," and the approving shout roused the devil 
 in Silas, and, seizing Katie by the arm, he uttered
 
 156 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 a brutal oath as he raised his right hand with the 
 open knife to strike. 
 
 Jabez had kept his eye on the man, and up to 
 this instant had been struggling to keep down what 
 he believed to be his sinful desire to silence the 
 other's insolence with earthly weapons. Now, as 
 he saw the knife raised, he was a converted man. 
 Well was it for Katie that her grandfather in the 
 long-forgotten days of his sinful youth had been 
 mighty in battle, power residing in the muscles of 
 his arms and shoulders, for which he had been fa- 
 mous when Silas Maxwell was a child. The dea- 
 con's legs were like steel springs, and without wait- 
 ing for his mind to direct them, they of their own 
 free will launched him like a rock from a catapult 
 across the store. The shoulder and arm acted 
 next, for the deacon always declared that it was the 
 physical body God had given him which acted for 
 itself when the closed fist dealt on the bridge of 
 Silas Maxwell's nose an awful blow. The bully 
 reeled backward one, two, three short steps and fell, 
 full length, over a keg of nails. 
 
 Jabez stood silent, while Silas gathered himself 
 up. He knew what was coming, and now he rea- 
 soned within himself, swiftly but sufficiently. And 
 when the huge fellow rushed at him intent on 
 crushing him, the old skill (he said it was learned 
 in the devil's service) now came to him for the 
 Lord's service in the defence of himself and the
 
 NON-RESISTANCE 157 
 
 child and the just punishment of that ruffian. Silas 
 Maxwell had for the first time met his master. 
 Those trip-hammer blows of Jabez Dickinson's tre- 
 mendous fist live in the village traditions. There 
 were but three, or at the most four, of them, with 
 the right arm first, with the left arm second, the 
 other arm stopping the puny thrusts of the bully. 
 And so it came about that Jabez drove Silas across 
 the store till he stood with his back to the window, 
 open to the floor. When he had him there he 
 dealt one more and final blow, right between the 
 big man's eyes, a blow backed up with a continu- 
 ous thrust from all the weight of his body, which 
 threw the ruffian off his feet, heels overhead through 
 the window. The mill-race ran close under that 
 window. The deacon knew it, and had been think- 
 ing of it all the forty seconds or less between the 
 first rush of Silas and his final exit. " Go out, 
 some on ye, and take him out. I kinder think he's 
 got enough of it," said Jabez, very calmly, as he 
 sat down and took Katie on his knees and kissed 
 her. 
 
 There was silence and awe in the store for a few 
 moments. Then some one came in and said that 
 Silas reckoned he had got enough, and had gone 
 home. Silas was converted then and thencefor- 
 ward. 
 
 Not so the deacon. He was, like all non-resist- 
 ants under like circumstances, in some danger of
 
 158 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 relapse into his old folly. I have not space to re- 
 late at length how his new sentiments became fixed. 
 It came about in this way : Miss Smith made a 
 descent on him the next day and poured out on 
 him the vials of her peculiarly unpleasant wrath for 
 "goin' back on non-resistance." He listened in 
 silence. Again and again, and again, alone and in 
 presence of whatever people might be in the store, 
 that inexpressible and intolerable female rated Ja- 
 bez. And Jabez became hardened. At last he 
 deliberately made up his mind that resistance to 
 a male bully like Silas had been a religious duty, 
 and, as a corollary, that resistance, duly measured 
 for the case, to a female bully like Almira Smith, 
 would be a virtue. So he prepared a trap, and one 
 day when Almira was coming down the street, and 
 Jabez knew that her entrance and assault on him 
 were as certain as foreordination, he set the trap. 
 
 "Jabez," said the sharp voice, as its owner en- 
 tered the store, "Jabez Dickinson," it repeated, as 
 she crossed the floor. " Look out, Almiry," said 
 the deacon ; " stop jist there or you'll spill some- 
 thin' !" 
 
 "What are you talkin' about, Deacon Jabez 
 Dickinson," said the keen, piercing voice. " I've 
 come in because I can't find it in me to pass by 
 without warnin' you " At that moment there 
 descended around Almira Smith a cloud of fine 
 black pepper. It began gently, and she interrupted
 
 NON-RESISTANCE 159 
 
 her tirade with a sneeze. She tried to resume, but 
 the more she tried the more she sneezed, and the 
 clouds gathered thicker around her. Sneezing and 
 dignity are incompatible. Continuous sneezing is 
 incompatible with self-respect or self -admiration. 
 Almira had no idea of charging her convulsive 
 affliction to the deacon's new doctrine of resist- 
 ance to vocal and other physical assaults. She 
 abandoned the field; she sneezed along the road 
 home ; she sneezed all night. 
 
 And Jabez chuckled, and kept his secret, and 
 lived, and is living now, a sensible man. " Ye see," 
 he said, in confidence, " I could 'a' stood Silas, and 
 if he'd 'a' come back I'd 'a' told him I was sorry. 
 Silas came in, and before I got a chance he told me 
 he was sorry, and I kind o' concluded I had been 
 doin' right. But the nat'ral man couldn't stand 
 Almiry Smith."
 
 XVI 
 SONGS OF THE AGES 
 
 I HAD driven into the village the evening before. 
 I knew no one there. The inn was clean and neat ; 
 the stable was good , my horses and myself had a 
 quiet Sunday rest. In the church in the morning 
 was the usual slim congregation, thirty or forty peo- 
 ple. Notice was given of a "service of song" at 
 the school-house in the evening. 
 
 It was a small room, and crowded. The kero- 
 sene lamps gave a dim light and a vile smell. 
 There were more people there than had been in 
 the church in the morning. The room was very 
 hot. A lady presided at the melodeon, facing the 
 assembly. For a while she led, by playing one and 
 another tune of her own selection. Then she asked 
 any one to propose hymns or songs, and voices 
 would be heard calling out this or that page of the 
 hymn or song book they were using. When a page 
 was so called she would at once turn to it, and 
 they sang together; it was good singing. They 
 knew the words and tunes, and sang with spirit 
 and appreciation. There were some harsh, some
 
 SONGS OF THE AGES l6l 
 
 reedy, some sweet voices. All together were me- 
 lodious. It was a pity, as it is everywhere in the 
 north country, that the words they sang were most- 
 ly doggerel rhymes which have become popular of 
 late years, and have demoralized the hymnology of 
 many parts of the country. 
 
 At length the lady left the melodeon, and a man's 
 voice broke the temporary silence which followed. 
 He was praying. I sat near the door, and could 
 see no faces. No one knelt or bowed a head. It 
 is not the custom up there. His prayer was short, 
 simple in diction, several times ungrammatical, but 
 it was heard, I doubt not, for it was earnest, elo- 
 quent, beseeching in its tone ; the prayer of one 
 who felt deeply the load of this world's weariness, 
 and whose faith was absolute in the promise of his 
 Master, which he cited : " Thou didst say that if 
 we would come to Thee we should have rest. Give 
 us rest, O Lord ! Amen." 
 
 Then there was silence again, and a woman's 
 voice broke it. It was not a pleasant voice. It 
 was somewhat nasal, a little sharp and shaky, and 
 perhaps querulous in tone. She only sang a word 
 or two alone, and then another, and then all the 
 gathering joined her in that wonderful hymn, "Art 
 thou weary, art thou languid ?" 
 
 There was something very moving, very thrilling 
 in the utterance of the hymn by that group of up- 
 country people. They were one and all hard-work-
 
 1 62 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 ing men and women, to whom life is the perpetua- 
 tion of the curse labor for bread. The touching 
 words in which Dr. Neale clothed the sentiment of 
 the hymn entered into their souls. There was all 
 the eloquence of which the human voice is capable 
 in the way they sang, with suppressed, inquiring, 
 almost doubting voice, 
 
 "If I still hold closely to Him, 
 What hath He at last?" 
 
 and a swelling triumph of assurance as they poured 
 out the response, 
 
 "Sorrow vanquished, labor ended, 
 Jordan passed !" 
 
 Music is not to be measured by any arbitrary 
 rules of the musical world. I have often heard 
 vesper song in St. Peters. I have heard a Te 
 Deum in Notre Dame, sung to God and to 
 the emperor and empress. There was never mu- 
 sic which ascended to Heaven more musical 
 than that song in the little New Hampshire school- 
 house. 
 
 As I walked along the dark country road in a 
 drizzling rain, stumbling over stones, and once 
 bringing up short against the end of an open gate, 
 I heard the voices of young people coming behind 
 me. One said : " Girls, who wrote that last hymn 
 we sung?" " I'm sure I don't know," said another.
 
 SONGS OF THE AGES 163 
 
 It was not exactly the thing for a stranger to speak 
 out in the darkness and tell them. But I went on 
 to my inn, thinking on this wise : 
 
 It is the fashion to speak ill of the ages called 
 Dark Ages. By reason of the bitterness of theolog- 
 ical controversy the Protestant world is very gen- 
 erally imbued with the idea that for a long and 
 somewhat indefinite period before the sixteenth 
 century the European world and all the rest of the 
 world was in a state of sin and iniquity ; degraded 
 in intelligence, in arts and in religion ; that every- 
 body went to the bad. The myth of the Dark 
 Ages is still believed in. 
 
 Out of those ages we have an abundant brilliant 
 literature, as glorious art, as pure religion as our 
 own age can boast. There was no more darkness 
 then than now. There were weak men and great 
 men, good men and wicked men, in the church and 
 out of it, then as now. 
 
 It is the fashion to ridicule the hermits and 
 monks of the early ages. There were dirty hermits 
 and dirty monks abhorring water and rejoicing in 
 uncleanliness. We meet such men, called clergy in 
 Roman and in Protestant churches, nowadays. But 
 there were monks and hermits of another sort, 
 too, as there are Roman and Protestant clergymen 
 now, men of holy life and labor, whose works have 
 followed and will follow them on earth and forever 
 hereafter.
 
 164 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 From the dark road through the little New Hamp- 
 shire village my vision went to a great gorge in the 
 mountains where the Kedron pours its floods in the 
 rainy season, plunging downward from Jerusalem 
 to the Dead Sea. The rocky walls of the narrow 
 gorge, broken and irregular, rise two or three hun- 
 dred feet above the noisy bed of the stream. Here, 
 in caverns and hollows of the rocks, perching like 
 eagles on the sides of the chasm, one and another 
 man, weary of the world, came and made for him- 
 self a hermitage, a hole, with what shelter the over- 
 hanging cliff might give him. After a while path- 
 ways, difficult and dangerous, along the ledges, led 
 from one's miserable abode to that of another. So 
 a community was formed, a sort of hermit village, 
 and its fame went abroad ; for there were great 
 men, learned men, noble men, who gave up the 
 world and sought repose and oblivion in the gorge 
 of the Kedron. Thus grew the famed monastery 
 of St. Sabas, once the most powerful monastery in 
 the Eastern Church. Here in the eighth century 
 came John of Damascus, last and not least of the 
 Greek Fathers of the Church ; and Cosmas of Jeru- 
 salem, Cosmas the melodious, poet and holy man, 
 whose songs are sung in all lands where Christians 
 sing. And with them was one Stephen, of whom we 
 know little more than that he was a Sabaite, and 
 hence is called St. Stephen the Sabaite. These all 
 wrote in Greek. St. John Damascene wrote the
 
 SONGS OF THE AGES 165 
 
 " Resurrection Hymn," which is known in Dr. 
 Neale's translation : 
 
 ' ' From death to life eternal, 
 From earth unto the sky, 
 Our Christ hath brought us over 
 With hymns of victory." 
 
 I wonder who was Stephen. He lived long, long 
 ago more than a thousand years ago. He was a 
 man, and therefore he had sorrow and labor, and 
 was heavy laden. He found rest, remembering the 
 Master's invitation. He remembered the very words 
 of it, as St. Matthew had recorded them, " Come 
 unto me all ye that labor ;" Komovree was the word, 
 "Ye laboring ones." He wrote an exquisitely 
 simple and beautiful song beginning KOTTOV re KCU 
 KapaTov : "labor and weariness" and it touched 
 the hearts of the good Christians of that and all 
 the after ages in the Eastern Church. Yes, my 
 friend, there were good Christians in the Eastern 
 and in the Western Church, in all those times. 
 Shake off the superstition that has enthralled you 
 about the Church, and don't any longer imagine 
 that all the people that have lived in Europe from 
 apostolic times down to Luther's day are damned. 
 You may find in heaven as large a proportion of 
 souls out of what you call the Dark Ages as out of 
 this age. There is no more sign of the millennium 
 now than there was then.
 
 1 66 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 It was not a great many years ago that Dr. Neale 
 translated, or perhaps rather reproduced the senti- 
 ment of the hymn of Stephen the Sabaite in our 
 tongue. And it entered the hearts of English 
 speaking and singing and praying people, and 
 touched the hearts of many who had not sung or 
 prayed before ; so that now all over the world they 
 sing: 
 
 "Art thou weary, art them languid, 
 
 Art thou sore distressed ? 
 ' Come to me, ' saith One. and coming, 
 Be at rest!" 
 
 I do not think there is any subject more worthy 
 the philosopher's consideration than this presented 
 to me in the school-house in a New Hampshire vil- 
 lage by the dim light of two kerosene lamps, listen- 
 ing to the voices of weary men and women singing 
 the song which Stephen the Sabaite wrote, a thou- 
 sand years ago, in the deep gorge where the Ked- 
 ron pierces the wilderness, hurrying down to the 
 Sea of Death. If I did not believe in any God I 
 should feel bound to inquire into that sameness of 
 human character, suffering, wearying, wanting the 
 same in old Palestine, the same in Russia, Greece, 
 Asia, Europe, America, and that oneness with which 
 the monks of St. Sabas and the young girls of New 
 Hampshire hold firm and unwavering the faith that 
 was delivered to the saints.
 
 XVII 
 IGNOTUS 
 
 THE road was across an open country. The hills 
 which skirted the western horizon were wooded to 
 their summits ; only one massive peak of bare rock 
 rose above the fringe of trees and stood out strong 
 and almost black against the evening sky. The 
 valley through which I was driving was very rich 
 and fruitful. The farms were well kept, the farm- 
 houses neat and comfortable, the barns and out- 
 houses indicating by their appearance the thrifty 
 character of the agricultural population. There 
 was for several miles no house which did not stand 
 in a group of trees, whose great trunks and spread- 
 ing branches were proof of considerable age in the 
 home location under their shade. At length I 
 came where on each side of the road was a row of 
 elms, large old trees, and soon to a group of houses. 
 The road widened and parted into two roads, with 
 a broad green between them. The elms were more 
 abundant, scattered here and there on the green. 
 A small church, with rows of horse-sheds behind it, 
 a house which could not be mistaken for any other
 
 1 68 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 than the parsonage, a store in front of which hung 
 the sign " Post-office," and about a dozen other 
 houses formed the village. 
 
 Before we reached the church the road passed 
 the church-yard. A low stone-wall separated it 
 from the road-side foot-path. It was easy, as the 
 horses walked, to read the inscriptions on many 
 headstones. It is always interesting to do this, 
 for the mere sake of the names, both the surnames 
 and the Christian names. I have given you lists 
 of peculiar names thus perpetuated, which I have 
 found in country graveyards. One acquires the 
 habit of catching a name quickly, even at a distance 
 and on a discolored stone. So as we passed along 
 I read aloud one and another and another name, 
 most of them old Bible names, now and then a 
 strange name, doubtless a home invention. 
 
 I read aloud Samuel, Hepzibah, Bezaleel, Marina, 
 Isaiah, Ichabod, Ignotus , and as I read the last 
 name I said " Whoa" to the horses. Surely that 
 could not be a man's name. I leaped over the low 
 wall and went to the grave which was near it. The 
 stone was a low, black-slate slab, on which green 
 and gray lichens were growing in such density that 
 the original color was invisible except near the top 
 where the slab was cleaned, evidently with care, so 
 as to leave the word " IGNOTUS" plainly legible. 
 And there was no other word on the stone. 
 
 Of course I was interested in this ; and you will
 
 1GNOTUS 169 
 
 readily imagine the succession of thoughts which it 
 aroused. At first I took it to be the grave of one 
 who, possibly knowing of the celebrated MISERIMUS 
 inscription, had directed the expression of utmost 
 humility to be placed over his ashes. While I was 
 pondering on this an elderly gentleman came along 
 the road, and seeing where I was standing, paused 
 at the wall. As I looked up he fixed his eyes on 
 me with an expression which said as plainly as 
 words could say, " You would like to know what 
 that inscription means ?" I took him at his word 
 or at his eyes and said, " Can you tell me any- 
 thing about this stone ?" 
 
 " Everything about the stone," was the reply, 
 "very little about the dust that lies below it." 
 
 " Then no one knows whose grave this is ?" 
 
 " Precisely so. The inscription and the grave- 
 mound together tell all that can be told. The 
 mound is long. The inscription is in the mascu- 
 line. The two tell you that an unknown man lies 
 below." 
 
 " May I ask who ordered the stone and the in- 
 scription for I fancy most if not all the other in- 
 scriptions here are in the English language ?" 
 
 " Yes, most of them ; not always the best of 
 English. I had this stone cut and set here. The 
 stone-cutter didn't understand it. As a rule the 
 people around here don't know what it means. 
 Pardon me. I should introduce myself. I am the
 
 170 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 pastor of these people. Most of the sleepers here- 
 abouts were of my flock. The living are my care 
 now. These are in God's care." 
 
 " And this man he was not of your flock, I take 
 it ?" 
 
 "No and yes. If the shepherd find a stray 
 sheep in ill condition, he should surely care for the 
 poor beast, and make it one of his flock till it goes 
 to its master. So it was with this man and myself. 
 He came into the village one dark night forty years 
 ago. He was ragged, dirty, old. There was a tav- 
 ern then over yonder. The landlord . found him 
 lying on the ground in front of his door. He was 
 a good Samaritan, my old friend Hezekiah Bolter ; 
 yonder is his grave. God give him rest ! He took 
 the man in and sent for the doctor, and the doctor 
 sent for me. But the man was past help from 
 either of us. He showed no signs of conscious- 
 ness until after some powerful stimulus which the 
 doctor administered. Then he murmured a little. 
 But he never opened his eyes. We stayed by him 
 for hours. His murmurs took the form of short 
 sentences, and these sentences were Latin. When 
 they were complete I recognized some of them. 
 They were familiar passages, now from Virgil, now 
 Horace, now Juvenal. Were these memories of his 
 boyhood, or were they the utterances of a mind fa- 
 miliar, as a teacher's might be, with the Latin authors 
 used in schools and colleges ? We did not discuss
 
 IGNOTUS 171 
 
 the matter then, but much afterwards ; and while 
 the doctor maintained that the man was probably a 
 teacher, I held to the theory that he was recalling 
 memories, quoting passages which he had not 
 thought of for years. We had, neither of us, any- 
 thing on which to base our arguments ; which is all 
 the better for freedom of discussion. He died be- 
 fore morning. There was nothing in the pockets 
 of his ragged clothing. We could learn nothing 
 about him, and there was nothing to do but to 
 bury him. I ordered the stone ; the doctor paid 
 for it." 
 
 Such was in brief, almost in full, the narrative 
 which the good old man gave me, as we walked 
 along to the gate by the side of the church, he on 
 the outside, I on the inside of the wall. We met 
 at the gate, and I ventured there to take his hand. 
 The words he had spoken were a simple story, but 
 there was a quaintness and earnestness in his tones 
 which had quite won me. I am not sure that there 
 are many pastors now (I know there is one) whom 
 you would expect to hear of as staying all night by 
 the side of a dying pauper, hoping for one interval 
 of consciousness wherein he might give to the poor 
 soul light for the dark road on which it was travel- 
 ling. I ventured somewhat more, after I had taken 
 his hand. I said, " And when you buried him you 
 prayed for him." 
 
 " Why do you think that ?"
 
 172 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 " Because just now you prayed for the repose of 
 the soul of Hezekiah Bolter." 
 
 "Ah, so I did; and so I do very often. What 
 would be the lonesomeness, what would be the in- 
 tolerable bereavement of this life of mine, of life in 
 this world for you or me or any one, if we believed 
 the dead were all gone out of the universe of God, 
 out of his reach, into an unknown domain where 
 they do not need a God, and prayer is vain. I have 
 been in the cure of souls here for almost fifty years. 
 The catalogue of those for whom it has been my 
 duty to labor and to pray is larger on these stones 
 and in these unmarked graves than in my list of 
 the living. I never gave them up while they were 
 here. I never gave up praying for them when they 
 went out of the reach of my care." 
 
 " And it seems to me you care somewhat for their 
 graves. I suppose it is your care which has kept 
 that word " Ignotus " so legible." 
 
 "Yes. I have never passed that grave without 
 saying to myself, ' Ignotus, Ignotus ; who was he, 
 who is he, where did he go ? I don't know, but 
 God knows. Lord have mercy on him !' " 
 
 As I drove on in the gathering twilight I consid- 
 ered what I had heard. There was something very 
 pathetic in the story of the ragged wanderer who 
 had left all that had been his in some part of the 
 world and died unknown. But it is much the same 
 with all of us. It is only a question of time how
 
 IGNOTUS 173 
 
 soon the memory of every man's name and the 
 place of his burial will be forgotten. If you look 
 back two hundred years you will astonish yourself 
 by finding how few graves of the dead of two cen- 
 turies ago are known by monument. If you go 
 back a thousand years the number is very small. 
 If you seek the graves of mighty men or renowned 
 women of the more ancient time, say three thou- 
 sand years ago, you will find, except in Egypt, few 
 if any besides the cave of Machpelah at Hebron 
 and the tomb of Rachel on the way-side between 
 Jerusalem and Bethlehem. 
 
 And the names of men are forgotten. They are 
 merged in other and strange sounds. It is not at 
 all certain that our pronunciation of those which 
 have been handed down to us in phonetic charac- 
 ters is remotely correct For all purposes of iden- 
 tification you might as well call the great Macedo- 
 nian Smith or Thompson as Alexander, pronouncing 
 the word "Alexander" as moderns pronounce it. 
 The Saracens call it Iskander. They are as near 
 right as we are. But it is not alone the names which 
 vanish. The greater the man the more certain it 
 is that a doubting generation will arise who will 
 pronounce the name and the man creatures of im- 
 agination, pure myths. Homer has but a shadowy 
 existence as a person. The greatest name in his- 
 tory is that of Moses, giver of laws not only to Israel 
 but to the whole race of civilized men to-day. And
 
 174 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 there are plenty of men of this age in which folly 
 flourishes, who deny that there ever was a Moses. 
 So the time may come when Washington will be 
 the name of a shadow as unsubstantial as that of 
 William Tell, and men will find in the fact that 
 many peoples have legends of great and good lead- 
 ers satisfactory evidence that no one of them ever 
 had such a leader in veritable flesh.
 
 XVIII 
 SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 
 
 IT was certainly as beautiful a spot for a home as 
 one could find in this world. A rolling country, 
 where the hills were sometimes crowned with maple 
 forests in autumnal splendor of colors, sometimes 
 cultivated to and over their ridges, yellow corn- 
 fields glowing with vast heaps of orange - colored 
 pumpkins, pasture lands in which good cattle were 
 feeding leisurely, brush lots crimson with sumach, 
 except where rich blue asters made spots of the 
 earth to look like spots of the sky. 
 
 But its beauty had not caused it to be thickly in- 
 habited, had not even kept the population here 
 which had once found homes in the valley ; for as 
 my horses walked slowly up the hill road we ap- 
 proached a house which, at a little distance off, 
 looked picturesque and pretty, but as we came 
 nearer was found to have only the beauty of ruin. 
 It was a deserted farm-house. 
 
 There is sometimes beauty in ruin. Nature oc- 
 casionally takes hold of the works of men's hands 
 and shapes and decorates them to be very beautiful.
 
 176 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 This old house had been a low story-and-a-half ten- 
 ement, painted red. The red had faded and been 
 washed into a score of tints, which only old tapes- 
 tries and embroideries can match. Wild -cherry 
 bushes, growing close around it, were trying to 
 match them, and in trying made with their leaves 
 very delicate and very surprising variations and con- 
 trasts. There was a spot of brilliant color which 
 caught my eye long before I reached the house, and 
 when I came up to it I discovered that a young 
 maple had sprung up in the shattered door-step, 
 and filled the doorway with its foliage, mostly of a 
 like color with the house, only there was a bunch 
 of leaves at the top, all as golden as gold. 
 
 Deserted farm-houses in New England are all 
 alike in the most prominent features, generally re- 
 sembling each other in many minute details. For 
 the life in them was very much the same, and the 
 life in the house gives specific character to the sur- 
 roundings. The worn spot on the little piazza of 
 the kitchen end, or L, is again and again visible, 
 the spot where the farmer sat down daily for a little 
 while when he took the very short rest which the 
 farmer can afford to give himself in daylight. The 
 marks on the inside of the window-seat are almost 
 always there, made by the broken mugs and tea- 
 pots and the cans and boxes in which his wife kept 
 her flowers growing when frost drove them in-doors 
 for the winter. Her garden is always there, and I
 
 SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 177 
 
 know a place where I go and gather roses some- 
 times from bushes in a dense tangle, which were 
 the garden roses of a farm-house that utterly van- 
 ished more than fifty years ago. 
 
 I drove on, still slowly uphill, and after a little 
 saw the customary burial-ground, enclosed by a 
 stone-wall, only a few rods from the road-side. Go- 
 ing to it I found four upright stones, and on one 
 of them read a name, and an inscription which was 
 somewhat startling : " But now they desire a better 
 country." 
 
 Why do so many people make the mistake of ex- 
 pecting to find that better country by going off on 
 railways? There is nowhere on earth a better 
 country than this Northern New England country. 
 When we get a reasonable amount of common- 
 sense into legislatures and law-makers ; when they 
 get to realizing what a good country theirs is, and 
 how good it can always be if they will preserve the 
 glory of their forests from the axe and the purity 
 of their streams from the saw-mill, it will be safe for 
 any one to make a home in it for the time he must 
 spend among the things that are uncertain. 
 
 Vermont and New Hampshire are becoming 
 wide-awake to the extensive abandonment of farms 
 and the gradual decrease of the best element in the 
 population. The people are inquiring into the 
 cause, with a view to finding a cure for the dis- 
 ease. It is a disease, and it is a disease which 
 12
 
 178 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 affects the community and the State by affecting 
 individuals. 
 
 The inscription on that gravestone suggests the 
 explanation of the disease. Those old people who 
 are never going to travel off in search of a new 
 home in the Far West were contented and happy 
 enough in the red farm-house, looking for a better 
 country beyond all seas, all possibilities of travel in 
 the flesh. Later generations were not contented. 
 Life was hard, and they thought to find a place 
 where it would be easier. They went to a large 
 town, to a city, to the West. It is beyond a doubt 
 that they went to less happiness, to harder labor, 
 with smaller reward. Not one in ten bettered his 
 condition by the going. If you had known the per- 
 sonal history of as many country families who have 
 moved away from the old places as I have known, 
 you would understand why I am so ready to affirm 
 that the great body of New England emigrants who 
 have gone away from these farms have done worse 
 than they would have done had they remained in 
 the old homes. 
 
 Is it probable that the efforts now made to turn 
 the tide of emigration and lead it into instead of 
 out of New Hampshire and Vermont will succeed ? 
 
 Why not? The land is fruitful and beautiful. 
 The climate is wholesome and enjoyable. What is 
 there to keep people away? Nothing, except that 
 vague idea which is so universally deceptive that
 
 SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 179 
 
 the better country, where one may grow rich with 
 ease, may live well without much labor, lies far off 
 at the end of a railway or a steamer journey. 
 
 There are some characteristics of American fam- 
 ilies in which they differ greatly from people of 
 other countries. One of these is in their ideas of 
 what form the necessaries of comfortable life. 
 That which goes to the daily support of a humble 
 family in America would support in luxury two or 
 three or more families in the same social position 
 in old countries. There are a hundred considera- 
 tions which an American has in selecting a home 
 which no European would stop to think of. I do 
 not find fault with these, but they are to be regard- 
 ed in seeking the causes of depopulation of por 
 tions of the country. 
 
 Contentment with a moderate enough is not an 
 American characteristic. It ceases in a few years 
 to characterize Europeans who come over here to 
 settle. The " enough " includes too many things 
 which are not necessities. ' Look at a practical il- 
 lustration : There are great numbers of American 
 families in cities who are in what are called reduced 
 circumstances. Men, women, sometimes husbands 
 and wives, have but small incomes. They have a 
 hard time to get food and clothing in the position 
 and with the surroundings to which they have been 
 accustomed. They suffer ; their lives are full of 
 Struggling anxiety, pains, too often debts. They
 
 180 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 are unfitted for work, and work, if they were able to 
 do it, is not easy to get. Thousands of these per- 
 sons cling to life in the city, where rents are high, 
 where food is costly, where the requirements of 
 dress seem to demand much expense. Now at the 
 same time you have the broad country, especially 
 New Hampshire and Vermont, with these facts: 
 The average expense of living of a family is not 
 $500 a year, and this furnishes better and more 
 abundant food, better and more clothing, better 
 everything that men and women need, than can be 
 found anywhere else in the world. You can hire 
 a house for $100 a year in the country which is 
 more roomy and comfortable than any house you 
 can hire for $1000 anywhere within miles of Mad- 
 ison Square. You can get better board the year 
 round in country places at $3, $4, and $5 a week 
 than you can get in a city for $13, $14, or $15. 
 
 But if you suggest to the persons struggling on 
 small incomes in city life that they go to the far-off 
 country villages of New England to live and be 
 happy, they shrink with apprehensions they cannot 
 define from what seems miserable exile. I am not 
 the one to make light of those desires, tastes, habits 
 of life which form the comforts and shape the pleas- 
 ures of all of us. No one can be happy for any one 
 else. But if the people who cling to life in cities 
 and expensive towns could be persuaded to con- 
 sider with common-sense the question whether, after
 
 SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY l8l 
 
 all, life in the country, with its abundant enjoyments 
 and employments, and its small expense, is not the 
 life they ought to adopt, it is probable that we 
 should see a beginning of the repeopling of aban- 
 doned farms, and a new growth of a valuable popu- 
 lation. A new generation might grow up to love 
 home well enough to live and die in it. 
 
 It is not at all probable that the New England 
 States will recall to their homes the same people, or 
 call to them the same kind of people, who have left 
 them. A new age has begun for all the eastern 
 country. Wealth has increased in cities. The cus- 
 tom of having a country as well as a city home is 
 largely on the increase. Before many years all 
 parts of the country which are healthy and attract- 
 ive will draw purchasers of lands for country homes. 
 Where a few will seek such homes in fashionable 
 localities for society pleasures, hundreds will seek 
 them in more economical and quite as enjoyable 
 places. More and more families will go into the 
 country for the whole year. More and more men 
 will retire from active business on small fortunes, 
 instead of remaining in it to increase them, with 
 the hundred to one chances of coming to grief and 
 losing all. People of moderate means, and people 
 of wealth, too, will learn how much nobler is a race 
 of children brought up in the country than a race 
 brought up in the city. And, to bring this to a 
 close, the man who can count on an income of $800
 
 1 82 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 a year while he has a family to support and care 
 for, will be wise enough to go where he can buy a 
 house and fifty or a hundred acres of land for $10 or 
 $20 an acre, and live like a prince on his own estate 
 from its produce, with an outside income of six or 
 seven hundred. But even there he must work. The 
 better country than the city is beyond doubt the 
 free land of fields and forests. But work and weari- 
 ness he must have forever on this soil of earth, nor 
 will there be work without weariness anywhere until 
 he shall reach the better country far away, which 
 the inhabitants of the old red farm-house desired 
 and I hope found.
 
 XIX 
 A WINTER NIGHT'S ERRAND 
 
 THIS is the story which the doctor told me. 
 
 Ezekiel Crofton's farm was on the slope of the 
 hill, two miles in a straight line from the village. 
 But to reach it you had to go more than two miles 
 down the valley, and a long one up the hill road. A 
 deep ravine, wherein flowed a noble trout stream, 
 cut off the farm from more direct communication 
 with the village. But the farm-house, with its barns 
 and out -houses, was a conspicuous object in the 
 landscape, as seen from the back windows of the 
 doctor's library. 
 
 There was sickness at the farm. Ezekiel's wife 
 and Susie's mother lay ill, and the doctor had left 
 her late in the afternoon with no little anxiety. But 
 he had other patients, for it was a sickly winter. 
 So Susie was instructed what to do if her mother 
 grew worse. It was of no use to give Ezekiel orders. 
 He was crazy. Trouble like this had never entered 
 the farm-house before. Susie was to watch her 
 mother, and report by a simple telegraph. The 
 doctor set the tall clock by his watch. At ten
 
 184 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 o'clock, at midnight, and at two o'clock, if her moth- 
 er should be worse, or if certain indications ap- 
 peared, Susie was to burn a blaze of straw on the 
 snow-bank in front of the house. The doctor 
 would see it and drive out. 
 
 It was a cold night and the moon was young. 
 The snow lay three feet deep on a level. A slight 
 thaw, followed by a freeze, had left a glassy crust 
 over everything. Then three inches of light snow 
 had fallen without wind over this crust. It was 
 after dark when the doctor reached home that night, 
 and he was a weary man. Did I say he lived alone 
 in his house ? Yet not alone, for one who had been 
 its light until a few years before never seemed to 
 him absent from it. And though now, as he sat 
 before the big fire, no one sat visibly by him, there 
 was a cheery look on his face, just as there used to 
 be when he sat there and talked to her. It is a 
 wonderful joy, that which some hearts have, of liv- 
 ing with those they love, whether gone away on a 
 visit, or gone across what men call the river of 
 death. 
 
 Dinner was on the table. Jupiter (son of Jupiter, 
 who was also son of Jupiter, slave of the doctor's 
 grandfather in that same village) stood while his 
 master ate and drank. He never believed in the 
 relationship between Burgundy and gout; and many 
 a bottle of good sound wine of the Wind-mill Vine- 
 yard found its way from his cellar to the lips of
 
 A WINTER NIGHT'S ERRAND 185 
 
 the sick poor. The valley was a rich one, but 
 the poor are always and everywhere. Would that 
 such physicians with such cellars were equally 
 abundant. 
 
 " Watch Mr. Crofton's farm from five minutes 
 before to five minutes after ten, and again at 
 midnight," said he to Jupiter. And the dark eyes 
 set in ebony could be perfectly trusted. 
 
 The doctor was asleep on a lounge when mid- 
 night passed. There had been no signal from the 
 farm. At two he stood at the back window and 
 saw the blaze flash up from Susie's bonfire, for the 
 poor girl was frightened and heaped the straw 
 high. By the successive flashes he knew that she 
 was throwing it on in armfuls, and that there was 
 great trouble and fear at the farm-house. 
 
 The weather had changed. It was still cold but 
 cloudy, and a snow-storm was hastening on. There 
 were plenty pf horses in the stable, and two power- 
 ful sorrels plunged out of the gate-way and down 
 the broad village street, bringing up with a fierce 
 rattle of the bells in front of the stone house near 
 the church where lived the clergyman. He, too, 
 was ready, for he had received warning from the 
 doctor in the early evening and had watched. I 
 am tempted to speak of him, that man whose mem- 
 ory is cherished by so many, who lived and died 
 for those over whom he was appointed. But there 
 is no space here. They two were men after one
 
 1 86 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 another's hearts. Happy the village with such a 
 pair of doctors. 
 
 And now the wintry part of the story begins. 
 For as they started a gust of wind met them, whirl- 
 ing the light snow which lay on the frozen crust. 
 When they left the well-beaten village street and 
 took the road down the valley a stiff gale was 
 blowing. The track had been cut down like a 
 deep canal between two banks, and the drift of 
 the light snow which lay on the crust was fast fill- 
 ing it. It grew darker, for the moon was just set- 
 ting, and it began to snow heavily. The runners 
 cut deep in the hard pack. The horses were well 
 used to such work, but there are impossibilities on 
 roads before the best teams, and they found the 
 first of these when the sorrels plunged into a heavy 
 drift at the fork of the road where you turn up tow- 
 ards Ezekiel Crofton's. Thus far they had come at 
 little faster than a walk, but for a few rods the 
 horses had found light pulling and were on a swift 
 trot when they plunged into this drift which lay di- 
 agonally across the road, full six feet deep. Down 
 they went, while the doctors and the robes went in 
 a confused mass over on the crust at the road-side. 
 
 No one was hurt, and at the voice of their mas- 
 ter, who was at their heads in an instant, the sor- 
 rels recognized the situation and stood up. The 
 drift was wide as well as deep, and the men right- 
 ed the sleigh, gathered up the scatterings, then
 
 A WINTER NIGHT'S ERRAND 187 
 
 broke a road through the drift by trampling, and 
 led the horses through and around the sharp turn 
 into the hill road. All was made right, and they 
 went on now very slowly ; for the whole track was 
 filled to the level of the banks, and the track on 
 this less travelled road was narrow, and had been 
 imperfectly broken before the new drift filled it. A 
 hundred yards from the turn the left runner rose 
 over a lump, caught the hard bank at the side, and 
 lifted the sleigh so gently but so swiftly that as the 
 doctor said "Whoa" he found himself lying in 
 deep snow, a buffalo robe over him, and the minis- 
 ter on the buffalo robe. The horses had heard 
 the word and stopped. This was a simple upset, a 
 common enough affair to both of them. But a 
 trace-hook had torn out, and it took ten minutes 
 to mend it, for now they missed the lantern which 
 had not been recovered at the first place of empty- 
 ing the sleigh. 
 
 I will not dwell on the many incidents of that 
 struggle, which the doctor related with keen en- 
 joyment of the memory. It was a serious piece of 
 business then. Sometimes it would have been lu- 
 dicrous, but for the solemn errand that took them 
 out in that tempestuous night among the hills. The 
 storm increased, and the snow fell fast and deep 
 and drifted into heaps. Again and again they 
 were upset until they ceased to count the times. 
 Now they went ahead and broke the way on foot
 
 1 88 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 for the horses. Now they took the horses out of 
 the sleigh, mounted and rode them a little way to 
 break road, and returned for the sleigh. Many 
 good reasons forbade abandoning it. They were 
 more than two hours on the half-mile between the 
 fork of the roads and the first farm-house. Here 
 they roused the people and held a consultation. 
 Farmer Brown had six oxen in a stable a quar- 
 ter of a mile off the road. He and his boys went 
 for them. It took an hour or more to get them 
 to the house, and the boys came near perishing. 
 But who would not have worked that night, at any 
 risk, to get the parson and the doctor to the bed- 
 side of Mrs. Crofton ? The six oxen were put into 
 the road, and driven up the hill through the drifts. 
 Slowly and with infinite toil, shouting and encour- 
 agement, they floundered on. The sorrels followed 
 in the track they broke. It stopped snowing, with 
 the atmosphere far below zero, as the gray dawn 
 came, and it was broad daylight when they entered 
 the back gate of the Crofton farm-yard. 
 
 The roadway to the door crossed a hillock in 
 front of the house, and the wind had swept it clean 
 of drift. The horses sprang up the apparently 
 clear track, but at the very summit again the left 
 runner flew high and the last upset was accom- 
 plished. In full view of the windows, as if it were 
 a circus show, the two doctors shot into the air and 
 clutched each other before they struck the glassy
 
 A WINTER NIGHT'S ERRAND 189 
 
 surface of the hillock. They struck in a slanting 
 fall and slid to the verge of the short but sharp 
 descent. There was nothing to catch hold of, so 
 they held tight, each to the other, and went like 
 projectiles down the icy slope, head first, into a 
 deep soft bed of snow. Ezekiel Crofton's New- 
 foundland dog was on the spot as their heads dis- 
 appeared, and then nothing was visible for a mo- 
 ment but his huge black skin and the doctor's 
 boots and one leg of the minister, at which the dog 
 was tugging as if to save a drowning man. 
 
 So ended, and ended joyously, too, the merciful 
 errand of that night. For the doctor, when he en- 
 tered the sick-room, found Susie in a wild excite- 
 ment, and her mother sitting up in bed laughing, 
 and out of danger. I don't know what the doctor 
 called the disease of which she was supposed to 
 be dying. It was some trouble of the throat. She 
 had been lying with her face towards the window, 
 gasping. Even in the hour of death, when she was 
 looking into the light as of the last earthly morn- 
 ing, the scene had overpowered all sense of solem- 
 nity, and the burst of laughter had removed the 
 trouble which was killing her. 
 
 It might do you good, once in a while these win- 
 ter nights, when you wake warm and comfortable 
 in your city bed, to think what possible errands 
 men like those two may just then be out on in the 
 up country.
 
 XX 
 
 HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 
 
 FIRST, as to horses. There is a common idea that 
 heavy horses are not as good travellers as lighter 
 animals. This does not accord with my experience 
 in really working-horses. For a spurt, or a day or 
 two of hard driving, it may well be that light horses 
 will go faster and come in less worried than heavier 
 animals. But for continuous travelling, with a rea- 
 sonably heavy load, day after day, taking any and 
 every kind of road, ascending and descending hills 
 and mountains, it is my opinion after long experi- 
 ence that strong, heavy horses are more trustworthy 
 and useful, do their work with less fatigue, and do 
 it better. My black horses, Ned and Jack, now 
 grown old and living in almost inglorious idleness, 
 weigh twelve hundred and fifty each. I have a 
 pair of grays that weigh short twelve hundred each. 
 My carriage with my regular travel load weighs a 
 trifle under fourteen hundred. Either pair of horses 
 will take us along on roads up hill and down at an 
 average gait of five miles to the hour. This is fast 
 enough for one to drive who travels to see every-
 
 HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL igi 
 
 thing that is to be seen' on both sides of the road. 
 It may happen, after a day of loitering along, that I 
 find myself towards evening eight or ten miles from 
 my proposed resting-place. My horses can do that 
 in an hour, and come in in good order. I seldom 
 average over twenty-five miles a day. But, on occa- 
 sion, I drive forty-five miles a day, without fatigue 
 to these horses. Few light horses can be depended 
 on for such little afternoon spurts, or such extra 
 days, over rough or mountainous roads, on a jour- 
 ney of four or five hundred miles, with three-fourths 
 of a ton behind them. 
 
 A comfortable carriage, comfortable for both 
 horses and travellers, is a very rare object in our 
 day. The tendency of late years has been to build 
 carriages to be looked at, or to show off the persons 
 and dresses of the occupants. With this has grown 
 the fashion of building carriages with narrow box 
 seats, into which two persons can crowd side by 
 side only by wedging as they take their seats. 
 
 In carriage travel the primary considerations for 
 the vehicle are strength and roominess. Don't save 
 a hundred or two pounds of weight at the expense 
 of strength. Get horses that will draw your load, 
 and don't sacrifice safety and sureness. By sure- 
 ness, I mean this : that a break-down in a lonesome 
 road, miles from a blacksmith, is an unpleasant ac- 
 cident. 
 
 Breadth of beam is what you need to give room.
 
 192 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 Your running-gear must be of the ordinary gauge 
 in use in the country you travel in, and your car- 
 riage-box as wide as possible on that gear. The 
 seats should be so wide that two persons can sit on 
 them with room between them for a book, or a 
 small bag, or any little traps. The front and back 
 seat should be on a level. I generally travel with 
 three in the carriage, one on the back seat, myself 
 and coachman on the front seat. This leaves am- 
 ple room on the back seat and bottom for books, 
 maps, flowers that we gather, wraps, and the small 
 impedimenta of travel -, while a rack behind the car- 
 riage holds the trunks, which are not heavy, but 
 with their leverage power balance the weight of two 
 on the front seat and make even springs. It is well 
 that the carriage top be an ordinary extension top, 
 reaching forward over the front seat, which can be 
 thrown completely back and lie on the baggage. In 
 soft October days there is vast delight in riding in 
 the sunshine. 
 
 To those who travel for the enjoyments which we 
 desire, it is objectionable to have a carriage door. 
 The side should present no impediment to frequent 
 stepping out and in, and the footsteps should be 
 broad and roughened. You see a flower, a bunch 
 of moss, a stone; innumerable objects along the 
 road-side attract your eye ; and you get out scores 
 of times and get in again with your treasure. As 
 the day passes you accumulate a heap of such
 
 HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 193 
 
 things that you have examined and talked about 
 after gathering. Towards evening, as you approach 
 your resting-place, out they go on the road-side. 
 Two-thirds of the pleasure and profit of this travel 
 is in thus getting out of the carriage, sometimes for 
 only an instant. 
 
 Going up or down hill I often stop, for the reason 
 that I have a brake. I italicize the word because it 
 is so absolutely essential to the comfort and safety 
 of both travellers and horses. It is marvellous that 
 in ordinary hilly country so few persons have brakes 
 on their pleasure carriages, buggies, or business 
 wagons. One can be easily attached to any vehicle 
 by any blacksmith, and will add years to the healthy 
 life of your horses. No trouble is more common 
 with horses than lameness in the fore-legs or shoul- 
 ders. This comes, in countless instances, from trot- 
 ting downhill with a load behind. The horse is not 
 free in action. If he were at perfect liberty he 
 would go lightly, set his feet down with instinctive 
 certainty and without pounding. But he has a load, 
 .pulling by traces on his fore-shoulders, jerking pulls, 
 now following fast on him, now brought up sud- 
 denly by a stone or a water-bar. No horse thus 
 encumbered can trot downhill without constant 
 danger of pounding his fore-feet heavily down, pro- 
 ducing a strain in the shoulder, perhaps twisting 
 his leg or ankle when his foot goes down on a 
 stone, or somewhere where he does not mean to 
 13
 
 194 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 put it. So, too, the strain of holding back a heavy 
 load, with the breeching around the thighs, pro- 
 duces the same effects. Of course no one will be 
 guilty of trying northern travel with a light harness 
 and no breechings. 
 
 I repeat, for the benefit of all the race of carriage 
 horses, as well as for the benefit of those who own 
 and value horses, that in a hilly country every buggy, 
 wagon, and carriage should be provided with a brake. 
 It is hardly necessary to add that for the pleasure- 
 traveller, who wants to stop anywhere along the 
 road-side, it is indispensable. In western Massa- 
 chusetts and Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hamp- 
 shire, a steady uphill grade of two or three miles is 
 a common feature of roads, and it is not uncommon 
 to find a mountain pass where the road is uphill 
 for six, eight, or ten miles. If one desires a glorious 
 ride, let him drive from Westfield in Massachusetts 
 to Norfolk in Connecticut, and learn how to ascend 
 and descend hills for the sake of every variety of 
 scenery. But if he try that country without strong 
 horses, a stout carriage, and a safe brake, he will 
 chance to come to grief, with no help in sight. 
 
 Look well to the bolts which attach the pole and 
 hauling -gear to your carriage. Many carriage- 
 builders neglect this. A heavy carriage, with abun- 
 dant iron -work, warranted strong, will often be 
 found drawn by two small iron bolts in thin rings, 
 both of which are daily wearing weaker. Reinforce
 
 HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 195 
 
 iron -work with straps. Iron is poor stuff to de- 
 pend on ; " there's nothing like leather." Have a 
 strong neck-yoke or strong hold-back on the end 
 of your pole. A brake saves danger there, but 
 you cannot be too safe. Don't forego safety for 
 the sake of beauty. Travel to look, not to be 
 looked at. 
 
 Don't trust your horses to the attention of host- 
 lers, but when you reach a resting-place, secure 
 their comfort for the night before you secure your 
 own. If you love your horses as I love mine, you 
 will need no such advice. When you start in the 
 morning take a thorough look over your harness 
 and carriage, to see that all is right for the road. 
 Talk a little while with the horses before you start, 
 chat with them once in a while along the road, es- 
 pecially if you happen to be walking uphill beside 
 them or before them, and always make sure to 
 speak with them when the day's work is done. 
 
 Cleanliness prevails in north-country inns. In 
 an experience of thousands of miles of travel along 
 New England roads, during many years, my note- 
 book records only three or four instances where I 
 was compelled to write " not clean " of the inn in 
 which I passed the night. Food is abundant ev- 
 erywhere and of the best quality. Good bread, 
 and milk, fresh eggs, fruits, vegetables, preserved or 
 cooked fruits, cake made in great variety these are 
 found on every table. There has been in former
 
 196 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 years a universal idea that beefsteak was essential 
 to a traveller's supper and breakfast. Country- 
 killed beef, however good in flavor, is generally 
 very tough and hard. The certainty of the ap- 
 pearance of this tough beefsteak has led me to 
 adopt the custom of saying when I enter an inn, 
 " Don't give us any beef." I recommend the trav- 
 eller by carriage to follow my example. I have 
 never found in Europe or America finer mutton or 
 lamb than is abundant with us all along our drives. 
 You should carry your own tea and coffee. 
 
 The roads are fairly good, but we notice, espe- 
 cially in Vermont, a manifest deterioration from 
 year to year in their character. They are growing 
 poorer, and this is perhaps due to the fact that the 
 towns are growing poorer. 
 
 The whole system of road-making by town-tax 
 is bad. It is not to be expected that a poor town, 
 which happens to lie on a route of travel between 
 two or more populous towns, should keep up first- 
 class roads for the use of those who pay nothing 
 towards them. Nor do people with whom road 
 making and repairing is a matter of annual taxa- 
 tion take any personal interest or have any per- 
 sonal pride in their roads. The worst mud holes 
 in roads are frequently in front of good farm- 
 houses. It would take the farmer an hour, with 
 his horses, to fill up such a hole and make a good 
 road by his front door. But that would be doing
 
 HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 197 
 
 work which is the town's business to do, and he 
 would get no pay for it ; so he lets it alone. If 
 he is drawing a heavy load uphill he chocks his 
 wheels with a stone to rest his horses, and drives 
 on, leaving the stone in the road. To throw it out, 
 and to throw out other stones left by other team- 
 sters, would be doing town work, and he will not 
 do that in his own town, much less in another 
 town. 
 
 Do you know what is meant by " working out the 
 road-tax ?" Each man's proportion of work is as- 
 sessed. He has so many days' work to pay. The 
 times of working on roads are fixed by the town of- 
 ficer. Carts, horses, ploughs, etc., are furnished on 
 order, and allowed for at fixed rates. You have 
 seen the deliberate slowness with which day-labor- 
 ers on railways, or on contract work in city streets, 
 perform their labor. These men are lively and 
 swift compared with the country farmer when work- 
 ing out his road-tax. The gravel-bed is perhaps a 
 half-mile down the road. Four or five men with 
 shovels load a cart there in three minutes, and hav- 
 ing loaded it, sit down and smoke and chat a half- 
 hour till it returns empty. Down on the roadway 
 four or five men await the cart, smoking and chat- 
 ting, dump and spread the dirt or gravel when it 
 comes, taking three minutes for the job, and smoke 
 and chat a half-hour till the cart comes again. If 
 they planted and gathered crops as they make
 
 198 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 roads, they would starve. It is not because they 
 are lazy or indolent. These are men of might in 
 their own affairs. But they are working out the 
 road -tax, and who ever heard that a man ought 
 to work in payment of a tax as he works for 
 himself ? 
 
 It is rarely necessary to drive anywhere in Ver- 
 mont or New Hampshire more than ten or fifteen 
 miles to find a good inn. Whether going north, 
 south, east, or west, it is usually practicable to ride 
 pleasantly in the forenoon for two or three hours, 
 stop at noon to feed the horses and get luncheon, 
 which will be called dinner, drive again two, three, 
 or four hours in the afternoon and strike a com- 
 fortable inn for supper and night-lodging. Day's 
 drives can thus be adjusted according to your 
 pleasure. You will linger in pleasant places ; you 
 will loiter along some roads ; you will change your 
 preconceived route suddenly, at noon, or in the 
 morning, or along the road. Sometimes you will 
 drive only a few miles. At other times you may 
 be induced to press your horses to their extreme 
 ability in order to reach a desired resting - place. 
 But I recommend you to regard your horses and 
 do not give them hard days' works. Let them 
 enjoy the travel as you enjoy it. You may have 
 great confidence in the health and strength of your 
 horses, but do not forget that for horses as for 
 men, travelling, eating in various places, spending
 
 HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 199 
 
 nights in various stables, drinking varieties of wa- 
 ter, subjected to various weather exposures, all this 
 is very different from home life. Oats vary as much 
 as bread varies. Hay is a very variable food. Men 
 will assure you in October that they have only old 
 oats, and sicken your horses by giving them grain 
 threshed three weeks ago, unless you watch them ; 
 and it is by no means easy to tell new oats from 
 old. For comfort and enjoyment an average of 
 twenty-five miles a day is quite enough for you or 
 your horses. If you enjoy the country, with its in- 
 numerable beauties, you will often be content with 
 five miles, and constantly desire to remain just 
 where you are. 
 
 Finally, don't be in a hurry, and when you start 
 out for the day's drive do not start with the deter- 
 mination to go to a certain place. That is not 
 what you are taking a carriage journey for. You 
 may and will fix on a place as a probable end 
 of your day, but don't go off in the morning with 
 mind set on reaching there as the day's purpose. 
 Loiter along ; stroll in the woods ; sit awhile on a 
 rock by the side of a lake ; stop long on the hill- 
 tops and take in the glory of American scenery. 
 If you are an angler, your rod, unjointed but ready 
 with line, leader, and flies, lies fore-and-aft on your 
 carriage seats, and many a brook or pond or lake, 
 in the spring-time, will pay you for a cast. In the 
 autumn your gun lies ready, and partridges crossing
 
 200 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 
 
 the road will tempt you often out of your carriage. 
 You will not get many, but you will have all the 
 excitement, and may now and then carry your sup- 
 per or breakfast in with you. 
 
 THE END
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
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