most other things in no wise baffle them. Though they do not pretend to be farmers, they have whole rows of yellow pumpkins and green squashes hanging from the hewn rafters, whole heaps of baking-beans on the floor under those same rafters, waiting to be shelled, whole vast closets lined from floor to ceiling with all conceivable preserves, jellies, cordials—and all of their own raising. Aha! say I, here is discovery, here is fulfillment; here is what Chiswick can do when it lays itself out. What farmer from down the valley can have done well enough to bring his son and heir, in one short generation, to this? It is all the rusticities and all the urbanities - honest-to-goodness, home-bred, indigenous urbanities, too - coalesced into one unexceptionable dream of what life can, after all, be!

And what I found was that my gracious host and my most graceful hostess were young reactionaries from - I mean against Greenwich Village, a little bored with the new spring styles in morals, and inspired to snap up the Hackett homestead very much in the mood of Horace taking himself off to his Sabine farm. With the aid of collectors, restorers, manuals, they had created the whole thing out of the purely literary sense of atmosphere. They were acting, not living- and acting most wondrously in character. But it was as artificial as a piece of vers de société, and, to the thing I had dreamed, as hollow. Reaping where they had not sown! What right have they to all those things? What right have they, with their carefully bred self-consciousness, their dainty mastery of how things ought to be, to dash off this symphony of themes wrought together in a technique which it is for time and need and the turmoiling generations to evolve? All in a moment they have snatched and ravished this foster-child of silence and slow time. The harvest is theirs, though they have

not bedewed the ground with their sweat; they pluck the flower, but they never sowed the seed. I had once the impulse to send them Wordsworth's Admonition to a Traveller, in large gothic, framed. But they would have had the wit to hang it over the fireplace in the hall, as a sign that they saw through themselves—and after all they are nearly the best thing in Chiswick. I have no grudge against them except that they have lived twenty-eight years without finding it practicable to let Chiswick, our Chiswick, make them what they are.

So throughout. The admirable and most winning youth in Mr. Jenkinson's store, who, charmingly but inscrutably, elects to ask me his questions on diction and syntax, ought to be a local farmer's boy putting in his nights over books of law and saving up his earnings for a year of Law School. But he is n't: he is straight from Cornwall, and his inconceivably gaudy name is Athelstan Trebarwith. And Mr. Jenkinson himself, a still youngish man who has the profile of Abraham Lincoln, and is of all men here the most gently lovable, Mr. Jenkinson is from Denver. Almost everybody that is best has come from somewhere else. Sometimes one wonders why they came. So do they, sometimes.

And the indigenes- they likewise reap where they have not sown. While the stranger within our gates has appropriated our country best, we have appropriated the city's worst and tawdriest. We are not, in an important or fundamental sense, an industrial population; the sprinkling of factoryworkers among us is as nearly negligible as you would expect in a place twenty miles from the nearest manufacturing city, connected therewith by a moderately quick trolley express. Yet it is from the factory and the factory tenement that our life seems to have taken its color or, shall I say, its drabness? Our library, except for the scattering

additions dictated by Vaughn, stops short at Louisa Alcott and Mrs. Stowe and Parkman and Fiske and Sir Walter Besant and E. P. Roe, and begins over again, after the hiatus, at Chambers, Owen Johnson, George Barr McCutcheon, the Williamsons, David Graham Phillips-in short, the cocktailand-limousine novel, Bohemian and eternally triangular; the sort of thing a factory-girl reads for vicarious experience of that kind of life from which she is most hopelessly cut off, and would still be cut off even if it really existed. Swinburne, Stevenson, Hardy, Howells, Bret Harte, Bierce, Mark Twain, Kipling, Stephen Crane, Mrs. Wharton, Synge, Yeats, Wells, Conrad - these these and many another simply fell through the hiatus. The magazine we read is, of course, the Cosmocratic. Of three hundred and forty-one persons in the audience at the Christmas play given by the Grange, two hundred and sixty-eight, by actual count, were chewing gum.

It was a native daughter who put Chiswick journalistically on the map by dismounting from the trolley on Main Street wearing the first ankle-watch ever seen in Connectichusetts. Our women dress themselves from the covers of Vogue, and our youths wear waistcoats of a flashiness elsewhere confined to patrons of the nothing-down-and-adollar-a-week tailors, plays of college life, and the more fastidious sort of criminals. Our houses are vivid with green plush and red near-mahogany. Melodeon and square piano and 'Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still,' with Brinsley Richards's variations, have been replaced by the cheap phonograph and 'Oui, oui, Marie.' In fine, our atmosphere is that of the factory town. We have not evolved taste out of our provincial vulgarity: we have simply replaced it by a different sort of vulgarity, which has not even the poor merit of expressing our own native deficiencies.

It was our personal luck for which, by the way, we are universally pitied to get possession of a house on The Ridge, at the western edge of the village, and facing away from it. We are quite four minutes from Main Street and the trolley. Before us, the land falls away in bold cascades and terraces to the bottom of a three-mile-wide valley, beyond which rises the low range of forested mountains which makes our western sky-line. These mountains are eternal loveliness, eternal variety: merely to watch them an hour is to read a romance crammed with action. One sees them swimming in ethereal detachment against vermilion sunsets; painted the uniform cobalt blue of November afternoons; hooded in ink-wash clouds, with only their flanks showing; rising out of the valley mists, with only their crests showing; sometimes near and menacing as a thunder-cloud; sometimes as remote and unreal as the smoke of vast Northern forest fires. And always they are clothed with loveliness. Looking at them, and stirred thereby to the worldold and universal impulse to help guarantee the lastingness of beauty by helping to renew its audience, I cry inwardly, 'What an altogether unapproached and unapproachable place to beget and bear and rear children!'

And then, as likely as not, I stroll down past the school to the post-office; and hear the language of the children swarming on the playground; and notice how the boys cluster round young Jimmie Aitkins, who is a thief and degenerate at twelve; and pass, not Pharisaically, by on the other side when I meet 'Elsie,' whose eternal pacing vigil is a source of ribald laughter to all. And then I go back to my hills, and sit down and wonder grotesquely why no lawcourt of Christendom judges complicity in the procreation of the species as the act of a dangerous madman, and a crime against humanity.

I

By pleasant gradations the families on my farm ceased to look upon me as a mere outsider occasionally invading my own territory. Their boundaries of courteous but impassable defense receded, until I could sit by their fires without feeling that invisible doors had been suddenly locked all about me. They welcomed me without the reserve of a key in the pocket. Coretta went so far as to say she did not care how long I 'stayed in'; and Coretta's opinions always echoed the hearth voice of the clan.

But it was because of Coretta that I sometimes looked at the horizon with the desire for flight upon me. One delight of my life in the highlands was a release from the clock. With prudent infrequency, I could make the night my own. If the soul made imperial clamor, it could be satisfied without damage to worldly schedules. But as surely as I made the star-pointed hours my mates of fortune, and saw them paling off toward dawn, dropping into a sleep that I meant should last until noon, just so surely an early daylight voice would bring me tumbling from bed, and down the crumpling and confining stairs, to unbar the door and find out whose barn was burning, or whose baby was 'bad off.' Sometimes Sam, more often Katy, would be smiling on the step. Coretta wanted to borrow such or such an

article for breakfast. It was always something without which no mountain breakfast could proceed, and the borrower, possessed of it, would go blithely off, leaving me to a broken day.

For months I tried to lead Coretta into the habit of doing her borrowing the day before. 'Come at midnight, if you wish, but leave me my mornings.' She would promise; then it would happen again the violent waking, with its sequence of futile hours. And she could not understand why her excuses, so confidently proffered, did not satisfy me.

'But I did n't know the salt was out till I looked on the shelf, an' we could n't eat biscuits 'thout salt in 'em.'

Or, 'That man come after supper to see about sellin' the cow, an' we talked · so late I clean forgot we did n't have a speck o' coffee for breakfast.'

Or, 'I was sure there was sody enough to put in the bread, an' there was the box plumb empty.'

Or, 'Uncle Rann got in last night. We did n't have a dust o' flour, an' I could n't set him down to pone-bread an' him come all the way from Madison to see us.'

Once, after a particularly disastrous offense, she showed a slight exasperation over my failure to get her point of view.

'But Sam had to git to the ploughin' early, an' you only had to jest set an' write!'

That moment ended my vain rebellion. I accepted fate and Coretta; which done, it was an easy matter to become very fond of her. She had a bluebell prettiness that never failed in any light or under any stress. It seemed so fragile, that I was always expecting it to vanish, or break into a mosaic legend of itself; but it never did. One day, looking in at her kitchen door, I thought of her as the fairy slave of a witch, made to mix strange brews and perform rude incantations. She was kneeling on the floor, before a pan of hog's feet newly scalded. A sausage-mill, screwed to the table, betrayed its unfinished work. From the stove came the hiss of a kettle of fat in danger of burning. A tub in the corner held partly washed clothes, drab with grime. Children darted, dodged, and crawled. And Sam, no doubt, was momentarily expected in to a dinner yet uncooked. But Coretta lifted a face so unconsciously and incongruously pleasing in its boudoir daintiness, that I laughed aloud, and had to cover the discourtesy with sudden interest in the baby's attempt to eat a bit of shiny matter picked from her continent of discovery, the ashpan. Coretta snatched the baby and began to feed it in the way most fashionable where milk-bottles are unknown.

'If I could skip a year 'thout a baby, I b'lieve I could ketch up with my work,' she said.

But a cherishing squeeze of her offspring confessed immediate repentance; and I had to remain dumb before the sublimity of ignorance that accepted death and birth alike as the will of God.

Her own mind was making occult connections. 'Did you see the sign in the elements last night, Mis' Dolly?'

I had not seen.

'It was jest after the rain stopped, an' it was awful. There was a great white cloud with red streaks like blood runnin' through it, an' they 'most made

letters. Sam said he guessed it was Hebrew, like the Bible was first wrote in, if we only had the preacher here to tell us. Nothin''s goin' to keep me from meetin' next Sunday. I want to know if he read it an' what it said. It may have been a warnin' to them people to stop fightin' us; but I reckon we'd all better be a little more keerful about doin' the Lord's will.'

I decided to defer any unorthodox suggestions, and divagated with, 'What 's the matter with Irma's nose?'

'She fell out o' bed an' nearly broke it. I had a time stoppin' the blood. I was so scared at first I could n't remember the verse in the Bible that stops it right off, an' I run aroun' tryin' everything else first. Then I got the verse right, an' her nose never bled another drop.'

'What verse is that, Coretta?'

"The sixth verse of the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel. Irmie never fell out of bed 'fore this, an' it was time she did. I was right glad of it after I remembered the verse and got the blood stopped.' 'Why glad, Coretta?'

'You can't raise a child that never falls out o' bed. They die shore. Did n't you know that, Mis' Dolly?'

Her face was an eager flower, but what I saw was a glimpse of mediæval gates opening on time's mossy twilights. Was it possible to pass through with Coretta, and look at the world with the psychology of a vanished age? Hitherto she had turned to me for scant crumbs of wisdom. Now she was a-quiver with the reversal of our rôles.

'I've been afraid to tell you about such things,' she said. 'Some people jest laugh at 'em. I been so sorry for you sometimes, doin' things I knew were bad, an' I dasen't tell you.'

'What things, dear?'

'Oh, like sowin' that sage in the garden. You shore have trouble if you sow sage. You have to get the bunches an'

set 'em out, or else get some strange woman 'at's passin' to sow it for you.' 'But is n't that unfair to her?'

'No; she loses the trouble as soon as she crosses water. She'd only have to cross the branch by the spring an' it 'ud be gone.'

That was the beginning of my subversion, which was soon alarmingly complete. If I had given Coretta crumbs, she now spread me a banquet. Her store of folk-wisdom fell upon me in showers that sometimes took my breath. Many of her rituals were too complex for memory here to set down, but she had scores of briefer ones, such as her cure for a dog's tendency to vagabondage. With an auger greased with 'coonoil made from a 'coon the dog had caught, you bore a hole in the gate-post. Then cut off a bit of the dog's tail and fasten it in the hole; but do not let him see you. If he runs away after that, you can be sure he was peekin' from somewheres.

She invited me to be present when granpap cured his mule of the swinney. Part one: we poured cold water on the mule's shoulder, then rubbed it with a flint-rock until it smoked. Part two: carefully directed by Coretta, we laid the rock back where we had found it, same side up, ‘an' pine-blank the same way.' And we did indeed cure the mule.

But her remedy for fever was perhaps the gem of her store. You take fodder that has never been wet, grasp all you can in your hand, cut it squarely off above your hand, and squarely off below. Of the remainder left in your grasp make a tea. This tea is an unfailing cure for any kind of fever.

'Why didn't you make it for Sam last year, Coretta?' I asked.

'We didn't have any fodder that had n't been rained on. That's the trouble with that cure. You can't git fodder that hasn't been wet. Every year I say I'll cure a bit in the dry, but I always forgit about it till it's too late.'

She was as learned in signs as in cures. 'There,' she might say, 'it's goin' to rain, an' I'd laid out to wash to-morrow!'

'But the sky is clear, and there's no wind from the west.'

'Didn't you hear that rooster crow when he was gettin' up into the cedar? If a rooster crows as he goes to his tree, his head 'll be wet 'fore he comes down. But maybe,' she reflected, casting no doubt on the oracle, 'it'll clear by sunup, an' I can wash anyhow.'

Her world of signs and portents and conjurations lay about her as familiar as her children's faces, or the grass before her door. It touched her at every point and turn of her daily life. And then one day I impulsively clashed through it and shook its foundations. I was passing Sam's cabin, when I saw, grouped at the roadside spring, Coretta, the children, and a young man who was holding the baby and lifting his shoeyes, lifting his shoe to the baby's mouth!

'Wait!' I cried, with a suddenness that made the strange young man drop the shoe, though luckily he retained the baby.

Coretta began to explain. "The baby 's got the thrash, an' I ain't got time to take her all the way to old Uncle Dean Larky's for him to blow in her mouth.' 'Blow in her mouth? That toothless old man!'

'He's got the power in his breath. Jest blows in her mouth an' says the three highest words in the Bible. But I couldn't go so fur, an' I've been watchin' for Zeb Austin to pass. He's blackeyed, you know.'

I saw that the young man was blackeyed at that moment rather flashingly, hostilely black-eyed. Whether a magician benignly engaged, or a fool caught in his act, the interruption called for resentment.

Coretta was still explaining. 'If a baby's got the thrash, an' a black-eyed