THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 175 



I love to think of those ancient days on the hilltop, 

 when a breed of men and women who tilled the fields, 

 hewed the forest, spun their own warm woollen cloth, 

 built solidly and well their storm-defying houses, could 

 wrestle with the dogmas of Calvinism, overthrow them, 

 struggle up toward liberal thought, and, from their high- 

 flung pastures, defy the ecclesiastical big-wigs on the 

 plains. They were a splendid race, and each generation 

 sent out splendid men into the nation. Even in my boy- 

 hood they were still a splendid race, though an aged one. 

 They were narrow, they were often ignorant, but they 

 were shrewd, humorous, independent, neighbourly, with 

 a love for their hills less expressive, perhaps, but no less 

 intense than the love of the Southern mountaineers. 

 I once encountered a mountaineer in the Tennessee 

 Cumberlands who had gone to Texas and started well 

 on a fine ranch. But, after two years, he was back 

 again in his tumble-down cabin at the head of Thump- 

 ing Dick Cove. 



"Didn't you like Texas?" I asked him. 



"Yes," he drawled. "I liked it well enough. But 

 come every Spring, I took to chillin'. It didn't agree 

 with me." 



That was his way of saying he was so homesick for 

 his hills that he gave up ambition and the prospects of a 

 comfortable fortune to return to his mountain cove- 

 side. 



So the old folk used to be in our New England hill 



