178 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



holds a town office. New Maryborough (birthplace of 

 "The Learned Blacksmith") and Monterey are other 

 towns with sonorous names. They are reached only 

 by the toilsome ascent of Three Mile Hill, and several 

 other hills besides, and though in Summer a new life has 

 come to them now, in Winter they are still as isolated 

 as of old, dependent on themselves for their intellectual 

 life and their enjoyment, if not any longer for their flour 

 and clothing. 



If you pass eastward from New Marlborough, ten 

 miles over one of the worst roads in Massachusetts, in 

 part through second-growth scrub (for all this hill 

 region has been ruthlessly and stupidly stripped of its 

 timber), in part through fields too plainly showing neg- 

 lect or actual abandonment, you come presently to the 

 other side of the plateau, where the hamlet of Sandis- 

 field hangs on the brink. Here are the typical hill- 

 town white dwellings, the meeting house and town hall, 

 and here the road is so steep as it plunges over that all 

 the soil has slipped off it and gone down the hill, leaving 

 the naked ledge. It was in Sandisfield that the post- 

 mastership was once forced on a reluctant citizen, who 

 presently amused the county by advertising a horse for 

 sale, and guaranteeing to throw in, to the purchaser, one 

 harness and "a perfectly good United States post 

 office." 



Down the hill from Sandisfield is New Boston, in the 

 upper gorge of the Farmington River. It is fifteen miles 



