186 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



golf club now! There is a movie theatre where an old 

 Colonial house used to stand by the village green, the 

 village trees have disappeared; the village, in fact, has 

 disappeared. That sophisticated thing, a suburb, has 

 displaced it, and the old democracy between town and 

 country is no more. The present generation is sharply 

 divided, and it is characteristic of the urban element 

 to have very little consciousness that the other still 

 exists. The self-sufficiency of our American cities is 

 rather naively amusing, in fact. 



Yet we have only to consult the records of the Post 

 Office department to realize what a tremendous num- 

 ber of Americans are in communication with the cities 

 solely by the aid of the Rural Free Delivery. Millions 

 of people live in New York, who nearly perish with 

 the cold on the rare occasions when the thermometer 

 drops to zero. Their newspapers print long stories 

 about it on the front pages. Yet up here in the hills 

 where I live, not a hundred and fifty miles away, we 

 go about our business with the mercury at twenty 

 below properly dressed for it, of course, which your 

 city dweller never is; and one of our rural mail men, 

 who is a woman, drives her plodding nag twice a day 

 across the bitterly cold flats, wind-swept and drift-piled, 

 carrying the messages from the outer world to the little 

 hamlet under the mountain, cheerful as the chickadees 

 in the evergreens beside the road. She has made 

 that journey twice a day every day for more than 



