THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 179 



from trolley or railroad, and the carriage road down the 

 river is none too good. But it boasts its saw mill, its 

 little street of white houses, even its Inn, once long 

 ago a tavern on the Hartford-Albany turnpike, and now 

 a resort of adventurous automobilists. The old turn- 

 pike climbs north through Otis, another hill town far re- 

 moved from lines of modern travel and sitting sleepily by 

 the road where once the stage coaches rattled through, 

 its old tavern still open but all its romance gone, 

 shabbiness and decay slowly but surely setting their 

 mark on the village as a plucked flower withers in a vase. 

 But of all our towns upon a hill, Beartown has suf- 

 fered most from the changed conditions. It lies or, 

 rather, it lay on a high plateau, the ten-mile-long, 

 flat summit of Beartown Mountain, between Monterey 

 to the south and the valley town of South Lee to the 

 north, with Stockbridge on the west and Tyringham on 

 the northeast. A century ago this plateau, which is 

 fertile and pleasant at an altitude of almost eighteen 

 hundred feet, was inhabited by a considerable popula- 

 tion and produced many thousands of dollars' worth of 

 wool, lumber, grain, and maple sugar every year. 

 There were well-tilled farms and acres of close-cropped 

 pasture. Trout brooks flowed down its ravines. It 

 boasted among the inhabitants a famous weather 

 prophet, Levi Beebe, who is still a Berkshire tradition. 

 Up and down the steep roads that climbed to it from 

 the valley passed the wagons of the Beartown farmers. 



