172 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



Yet even here we were not at the top of the hill. We 

 were on a plateau, to be sure, and a road branched to the 

 west, just beyond the store, and another, above the mill 

 pond, turned to the east. But both roads led to farms 

 which could be seen pushing their cleared pastures 

 up toward higher wooded summits, and ahead the main 

 road still climbed toward the "old" village. With a 

 lighter load, we continued our journey, coming, after 

 nearly half a mile, almost to the top of the world, and 

 finding to my amazement the weed-grown remnants of a 

 village green, with two fine old Colonial houses facing 

 it, houses with delicate fanlights over the doors and 

 graceful Greek borders under the eaves, and on one side 

 a dilapidated building which had been the town hall a 

 century ago a building three times the size of the 

 present hall; on the other, a white meeting house 

 similarly dilapidated and similarly superior in size to the 

 new. Here the road divided, one branch going on 

 through the upland pastures, still climbing steadily till 

 it crested the two-thousand-foot divide between Massa- 

 chusetts and Vermont, the other keeping to the sixteen- 

 hundred-foot level and making for the hills of North 

 Heath to the east. It was toward one of those hills the 

 stage driver pointed, and delivered his final observation. 



"There's a cemetery over yonder on that hill," he 

 remarked, "which they say is the highest p'int o' culti- 

 vated ground in Massachusetts." 



I came to know this village well in the days that fol- 



