A WEEK ON WALDEN'S RIDGE. 155 



Another Fairmount building (an unmis- 

 takable house, this time) is memorable to 

 me because on the doorstep, day after day, 

 an old gentleman and a younger antagonist 

 — they might have been grandfather and 

 grandson — were playing checkers. " I 

 hope you are beating the young fellow," I 

 could not help saying once to the old gen- 

 tleman. He smiled dubiously, and made 

 some halting reply suggestive of resignation 

 rather than triumph ; and it came to me 

 with a kind of pang, as I passed on, that if 

 growing old is a bad business, as most of us 

 think, it is perhaps an unfavorable symp- 

 tom when a man finds himself, not out of 

 politeness, but as a simple matter of course, 

 taking sides with the aged. 



Fairmounters, living in the woods, have 

 no outlook upon the world. If they wish to 

 see off, they must go to the Brow, which, by 

 a stroller's guess, may be two miles distant. 

 My first visit to it was the pleasanter — the 

 more vacational, so to speak — for being an 

 accident. I sauntered aimlessly down the 

 road, past the scattered houses and orchards 

 (the raising of early apples seemed to be 

 a leading industry on the Ridge, though a 



