218 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



as solid as on the day it was completed. The rotted man- 

 tels were simply wrought, but with perfect lines, and the 

 panelling above them was extremely good. So was the 

 delicate fanlight over the door, in which a bit of glass 

 still clings, iridescent now like oil on water. Under the 

 eaves the carpenter had indulged in a Greek border, and 

 over the woodshed opening behind he had spanned a 

 keystone arch. Peering into this shed, under the collaps- 

 ing roof, you see what is left of an axe embedded in a 

 pile of reddish vegetable mould, which was once the 

 chopping block. Peering through the windows of the 

 house, you see a few bits of simple furniture still in- 

 habiting the ruined rooms. Just outside, in the door- 

 yard, the day lilies, run wild in the grass, speak to you of 

 a housewife's hand across the vanished years. The 

 barn has gone completely, overthrown and wiped out by 

 the advancing forest edge. Enough of the clearing still 

 remains, however, to show where the cornfields and the 

 pastures lay. They are wild with berry stalks and 

 flowers now, still and vacant under the Summer sun. 



The ruins of war are melancholy, and raise our bitter 

 resentment. Yet how often we pass such an abandoned 

 farm as this without any realization that it, too, is a ruin 

 of war, the ceaseless war of commercial greed. No less 

 surely than in stricken Belgium has there been a depor- 

 tation here. Factories and cities have swallowed up a 

 whole population, indeed, along the Beartown road. 

 It is easy to say that they went willingly, that they pre- 



