98 NATURE'S REALM. 
cellar holes are deepest. Even the purple fire- 
weed which always followed the burnt land of 
the clearings has totally disappeared, and its 
place is usurped by the dog-wood and poison 
ivy. There has not been a new clearing for 
fifty years! And the aggravating part of the 
whole business is that a vagabond crow, which 
keeps up a bawling from the top of a neighbor- 
ing rampike, actually presumes to resent our 
intrusion, and wakes up a whole colony of his 
black imps, who join in a lusty guffaw as they 
take wing. It is the unkindest cut of all ! 
It was a hard and unseemly fate which drove 
our fathers from their homes and scattered 
them abroad. Cold-blooded economists tell us 
it was avarice, restlessness and love of gain 
which impelled them ; but we, who have lived 
among these granite hills and love them all so 
well, know the inexorable ‘“‘ cinch” which vicis- 
situdes of trade and change of markets “get” 
onaman. Think you, indulgent reader, upon 
mature reflection, that mere love of novelty and 
lucre would of itseltshave kept these wandering 
argonauts so long away from the ancestral 
farms, while their infirm old parents lingered, 
and perhaps languished in solitude through a 
prolonged old age? 
Let us not believe it. 
When the country was first settled the pop- 
ulation was circumscribed and the methods of 
livelihood crude and simple. Isolated little 
communities supplied their own frugal wants. 
Home demands nurtured home industries, but 
the thriftiest were not enriched. There was 
no currency and small use for credit, except in, 
kind. Since then locations more suitable for 
agriculture have been discovered and occupied. 
Steam and electricity have supplanted the 
brawling mountain streams which erst were 
utilized for scores of manufactories, just as in 
still earlier times they had afforded the only 
thoroughfares for inland travel. And nowit is 
a full generation since the young energies of 
these hill families went out into the West and 
to the metropolitan centres to seek the fortunes 
which never could be won at home. Surely, 
natural instinct must soon drive many of them 
back, after so long an interval, to rehabilitate 
their ancestral domains with their accumulated 
wealth, and so light up the family hearthstones 
once more with life and joy. Why may they 
not return to bless and receive the blessing ? 
A few survivors are still waiting for them. 
Enough of gain is enough. Or would these 
busy toilers consume all their lifetime in the 
effort to be millionaires, and so permit the in- 
firm old people on the homesteads to close each 
other’s eyes as best they may, while their 
breath goes out with unsatisfied longings and 
vain regrets? Why, a dollar inthe Hampshire 
hills will go as far as ten in the whirl of fash- 
ion or the business swim—yea, farther than a 
hundred! And how much true happiness 
might be doubly earned in restoring the old 
places, painting up the weathered houses. re- 
shingling the barns, embeliishing the lawns, 
rejuvenating the pasture-lots and the old fields, 
cutting out the tangle by the roadside, setting 
up the tennis nets, and collecting the waters of 
the errant brooks for trout ponds! Place the 
old people out on the porch in their easy 
chairs and let them watch the progress of the 
innovation. It would be like the development 
of a new world to them. If the absentees can- 
not come to abide permanently, let them fix 
here their summer homes. Here is present 
choice of pretty houses, now tenantless, for the 
trifling rent of thirty dollars per year; or you 
can buy the house with plot of ground out- 
right for the paltry sum which the rich man: 
lavishes on a livery for his coachman or an af- 
ternoon lunch. Why follow the gnis fatuus 
of caprice and fashion to inhospitable parts, 
where envy and rivalry for precedence and 
love of display are the animating impulses > 
flere is peace and rest. 
Are there any localities in the iand more ca- 
pable of embellishment and improvement ? 
The whole region is like a park, with moun- 
tain views and bucolic scenes inimitable. Na- 
ture has fashioned it with rounded lines of 
beauty, and presented it in every conceivable 
form to please the summer sojourner. These 
old hill farms have commanding sites. Very 
few of them lie in the valleys because there are 
no valleys! Wherever there is a valley there 
is a ravine and a tumbling stream, with barely 
breadth enough for a wagon road, over which 
the interlacing foliage forms an arch. Were 
ever drives more shady or more rustic! No 

