176 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



towns when I first made their acquaintance. Already 

 their lot was getting hard, as the lowlands drained the 

 best of their youngsters away from them, and our 

 changing civilization made the problem of living without 

 money to exchange for goods once produced at home, 

 increasingly difficult. But they loved their homes, 

 they cherished intensively their traditions, in silence 

 they would take me to some hilltop whence a vista 

 stretched over green mountain billows and ravines of 

 steely shadow to the far plains or the blue saddle of 

 Graylock, and in the sunset hush and still time of the 

 world let their gray eyes wander back at last to the little 

 white village straggling up the slope at their feet, and 

 say, gruffly: "It's kind o' sightly, hain't it?" 



But that generation is almost gone, and with its 

 passing many a white farmhouse built of home-hewn 

 oak and chestnut beams, of clear pine boarding and 

 clapboards cut from first-growth spruce, is vacant of 

 human occupants, and soon will be in ruins. The hill- 

 top towns are passing, the stock who settled them is 

 dying out. There are favoured villages, to be sure, 

 where the rising tide of summer home seekers has 

 brought a new prosperity, though a prosperity quite 

 unlike the old and lacking its flavour of democratic 

 independence. In some cases, too, the driving through 

 of state highways by the shortest route, over hill and 

 dale, has brought certain towns into new communica- 

 tion with the outside world. But for the most part our 



