A New England Hill Town: Ii. Its Revival

I.

ONE would suppose that a decadent Massachusetts hill town — stricken in its industries, cursed with an abnormal heredity, dwarfed and crippled and malformed as to its personal and individual life — would be the most discontented community in the whole realm.

But no ; contentment is the chief vice of Sweet Auburn, and the native religion is largely to blame for it. Christian, Paulinist, or Edwardsian, — every one of us holds a fatalistic philosophy. Theoretically, our people believe in free will; practically, they are determinists ; hence, a basking, lethargic, subtropical acquiescence in things as they are.

When the gospel of “ manifest destiny ” goes leagued with bucolic inertia, it gets itself kneeling devotees by the chapelful. Religion, as well as commerce, follows the line of least resistance. Find Europe with its gleaming harness buckled on, and its many-barbed, brainbesmeared mace already in hand, and you may preach a crusade. The highways will speedily be covered with pious marauders, getting sure salvation to their souls. Find a torpid village, half dozing in languorous, sun-warmed, poppy-lulled disinclination, and there you may preach a Moslem doctrine of devout submission. You may hope erelong to see that village sound asleep in its chair.

We contentedly adore this village, because we are too lazy to visit any bettor place. You can find “ natives ” in Sweet Auburn who have never ventured beyond the visible horizon. Few of our villagers have traveled a hundred miles from home. The civil war called a stalwart half dozen into the South ; three or four of our men took up claims in the West, and returned disappointed. Now and then some local sage is summoned to Greenfield to serve on a jury. In midsummer the railway contrives a sweltering excursion to Crescent Beach, and, unable to resist the fascination of a half-fare ticket, we stuff a basket with sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and go in for misery. But whenever we move at all we misrepresent Sweet Auburn, which is a community of Blue Points.

We take this town so seriously. Where indeed were greatness more fitly employed or more suitably displayed than in this paragon of villages ? See how we trip and batter one another, in our efforts to gain public trust! See how eager every man becomes, in his desire to multiply his municipal responsibilities ! There is “ Square ” Glenn, notary, road commissioner, auctioneer, newspaper correspondent, undertaker, and trustee of several estates. That’s what we call a man, — a pocket Titan !

There is, if you ever happened to think of it, a sort of equality between the greatness of little men and the littleness of great men. Square Glenn and Julius Cæsar, — might they not drain a convivial bumper to their dominant passion ? Each would rather be first in a little Alpine village than second at Rome. But observe: Cæsar had seen Rome ; Square Glenn has seen nothing bigger than Ciderville.

What Sweet Auburn really needs is to have fun poked at it. If I were not so tender-hearted, I should poke fun at it myself. I should be conferring a magnificent ethical and sociological benefaction upon our village, if I could only enable it to get for but a moment the urban point of view.

Strange, what notions we have of the city. The older people will tell you about the time they went to Boston; with an equal shudder they will tell you about the time they had their teeth out. The one suggests the other. Their ears still ring with the city’s rattle and clangor. Their feet still ache from its stony pavements. Their involuntary locomotor nerve tracts still spring in terror at the apparition of glittering equipages bearing down relentlessly upon them. One such day was sufficient. Back to tranquil Sweet Auburn they hied them then, and vowed a vow to remain there till the trump of angelic reveille.

The younger generation take rather more leniently to urban existence. Some have even lived in the city during protracted periods. Such understand all things. Once quartered in a cheap boarding house in a back street in Springfield, they are qualified to pronounce upon high life. Or perchance a buxom country lass becomes a servant in Hartford, and having formulated a strictly culinary interpretation of that beautiful city, returns to her native hamlet. Wonderful tales she tells, and in Sweet Auburn, at least, hearing is believing. “ When I was in Hartford, I seen a man that seen a man that said he seen the devil.” Then in vain would Richard Burton and Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain and Joseph Twitched stand with their hands on their hearts and their eyes turned up to heaven, and swear that in Hartford there was no devil! This is not funny ; it is pathetic.

Yet, underneath piety, underneath immobility, and underneath our complete and exhaustive ignorance, lies fundamentally imbedded a fourth and a greater cause. It is the adamantine substratum which sustains contentment, and incidentally sustains all things else. Its name is stinginess.

See how this works ! If we were not so minutely, so cautiously stingy, we should pay up the minister’s back salary. The minister would then liquidate his historic indebtedness. When the debts were once disposed of, the minister could honorably leave town. When there was no more minister, the religion of the land would lapse into consequent decay. There would be an end of fatalism. The village would ask itself whether it were really necessary to submit to itself. Dissolution would result.

Our stinginess has set apart and ordained as its priestess the Old Lady Goodspeed. Nathan Goodspeed, her husband, who was locally reputed to be “ right up an’ daown, like a sheep’s hind leg,” built the wallet factory, operated it profitably for some thirty years and more, and died “ pretty well heeled,” bequeathing his entire fortune to his wife. Now, the Old Lady Goodspeed, whose acquisitive shrewdness is equaled only by her powers of retention, has since mounted guard over the treasure hoard with unslumbering vigilance. Her sole indulgence is a hired man, cheapest to be had, named John Perkins. She manipulates John in rigid accordance with the exigencies of the estate. Skeptics need only observe the ingathering of the cherries, to be convinced of this.

John must not shake the cherry tree ; that would bruise the fruit. No, John must ascend a stepladder, and pluck the cherries one by one; and while he plucks them he must whistle. It is so designated in the scroll : I wonder why ! Does the gathering of small fruit tend to pucker the lips? I “don’t sense it that way ; ” neither, I fancy, does John, for ever and anon the whistling ceases. Then is a lace-capped head thrust out of a dormer window, and a gentle voice calls sweetly: “John! John! I don’t hear you whistling! Whistle, John! I like to hear a man whistle at his work.”

In the whistling of John Perkins I find a token or an emblem of absolute immutability. Things will stay put. You cannot scare us with omens of progress. We shall banish every suggestion of improvement, because improvement will cost money.

Clearly, then, whatever help is to succor the decadent hill town must come from without, and not from within. Writing of Montana, I could afford to be optimistic. Montana has youth, courage, elasticity, and ambitious, expansive energy. Its progress is the normal result of resident forces. Sweet Auburn, on the other hand, has already spent its vitality. It is bowed and bent. Its blood runs tepid. Its sight is dim. It is garrulous and egotistic. It promises nothing from resident forces. Religion means to it, not aspiration, but acquiescence; enterprise means, not exhilaration, but fatigue; experience means, not satisfaction, but perplexity; novel information means, not enrichment, but rebuke ; the accumulation of property means, not the funding of increasing potentialities, but the mere hoarding of sterile and dormant acquisitions.

Sweet Auburn is a concentrated sample or essence of what the pistoled ranchman is wont to term “ the effete East.”

II.

“How shall he get wisdom,” queries an ancient classic, — “ how shall he get wisdom that holdeth the plough and whose talk is of bullocks?” That is, I suspect, the most venerable expression of disdain for the farmer’s intellectual capacity. That is the hinge or centre from which have radiated for hundreds of years innumerable fan rays of contempt. Here in Massachusetts, as chance has directed, the aspersion finds a chivalric statement by way of faint praise. You have a manner of saying that the New England agricultural classes are “very intelligent,” — meaning, if I mistake not, that they are very intelligent for farmers !

There is a certain more or less rational basis for your conclusions. We of Sweet Auburn are a gullible folk. We have never grown up, and we never shall. We conserve, even to our latest years,

Experience is what we need, says social therapeutics; and the whole round world knows we are getting it, but somehow we seem never to get enough. Traveling oculists, with smug, shaven faces and mysterious gold earrings, do treasonable things to our crystalline lenses; but we turn no less pliant attention to the representations of the itinerant dentist. That man of science, having extracted our teeth and made off with a “deposit,” never returns to bring us the finished product which was to emerge, at no distant day, from his remote laboratory. Then, instead of learning that one must seek treatment of a reputable practitioner, or be fraudulently dealt with, we are only thereby made ready to pay tribute to the next Kickapoo Indian who pitches his conical dispensary in Ichabod’s cow pasture. The rural mind disregards negative factors in every consideration. It doggedly goes on so disregarding. We still fall easy prey to book agents; we still feed tramps, as who should say, “ If you come within a mile of here, drop in ; ” we bid against ourselves at auctions ; we have implicit faith in the power of “ divining rods ” to locate hidden springs; we are agreed that a “ rose-back ” pig will fatten auspiciously; we are even somewhat credulous of “Western loans,” and we have a sensation of glossy, satinlike satisfaction when made aware that wealthy investment companies have “ heard us well spoken of ” in the Rockies. Kant says this is an age of criticism : so it is, but not in Sweet Auburn.

Add to our gullibility a modicum of dialect, and to dialect add uncouthness of garb, and you have the farmer as travestied upon the stage and as lampooned by the public press. You fail to realize that such characteristics result, not from native deficiency, but from isolation and neglect. You overlook the fact that many a hard-headed, clearthinking, capable fellow is holding the plough and discoursing of bullocks. You forget that the pursuit of agriculture has numbered among its devotees such inspired souls as Amos of Tekoa, Cincinnatus of Rome, Cædmon of Whitby, Petrarca of Vaucluse, Burns of Ayr, Millet of Barbizon, and George Fuller of Deerfield. You forget, too, that it takes brains to farm.

Work in a factory, and what are you ? A dolt and a stupid drudge. Man has made the machine, and the machine has unmade the man. Work on a farm, and what are you? Ah, thank God, you are the defter, and the wiser, and the brimfuller of versatile, polytechnic resourcefulness every day of your rustic life. Division of labor is here reduced to a sociologic absurdum. Where the laborers are few, each must be all. The farmer is merchant, executive manager, political economist, carpenter, machinist, woodman, icecutter, physician, veterinary, weather prophet, biologist, chemist, cobbler, barber, brewer, and systematic theologian. Specialists rise into occasional prominence. A farmer moved my barn, a farmer repaired Helen’s watch, a farmer papered our parlor, a farmer revamped Topsham’s harness. If there is anything like intellectual stimulus or tonic in manual training, we are getting our share of it.

Or compare the yeoman’s employment with the stultifying tram-horse routine of the petty merchant, or salesman, or accountant. Such will have brains that tick like metronomes, whereas our ideas — and the praise is to our occupation — go singing a varied melody. Change the farm for the shop or the office ? Not we.

Yet another kindly circumstance: the practice of agriculture leaves the attention disengaged much of the time. Here, as in jail, one may think. But what shall one think about? Ploughs and bullocks ? Yes, to be sure, but what beside ?

The shrewdest among us — save only in haying time, when evening finds us too weary for intellectual toil or recreation— read good books and reputable journals. Our “public library,” whose shelves are heaped high with volumes purchased with an eye single to quantity, nevertheless contains not a little standard fiction. Packets of newspapers from New York, Boston, and Springfield come in on the morning train. We swear by the “ Trybune.” Best of all, we have read and pondered, and re-read and digested, a celebrated collection of devotional writings, done into stately English many centuries ago by William Tyndale, and little bettered by subsequent revisions. Israel had never heard of Lord Tennyson; Cap’n Anthony knew nothing of James Russell Lowell; but both are familiar with the matchless lyrics and elegies of David and Isaiah. Great literature, then, and public affairs ought to share with religion the hospitality of the rustic mind. Sometimes they do.

The defect — and, with things as they are, the pitiable and irremediable defect — in the higher life of Sweet Auburn is the lack of touch with inspiring personalities. No printed page can do the work of heart and hand and speaking voice. Survey your own intellectual heritage, and ask yourself how weighty a share of it came to you otherwise than through the mediation of living souls. Wherever in Sweet Auburn a cultured, city-bred guest is made welcome, I find a response to things human ; wherever a son has gone to the “ Aggie ” College or a daughter to “ Smith’s,” I find an interest in large concerns. Smith is coeducational. When a girl enters Smith, the whole family goes along with her. Would that such cases were commoner !

The mental energies of Sweet Auburn go sailing, for the most part, upon “ the stagnant goose pond of village gossip.” They do so because there is no one to show them a fairer roadstead. But gossip like ours is superb ; never was goose pond more irresistibly alluring.

I have observed that gossip in Sweet Auburn consists of two somewhat distinct elements, — the legend and the mythus. The legend begins with fact, and ends with fancy. It is magnified and idealized history. I am not afraid of the legend. I intend so to order my ethical career as fearlessly to endure unsympathetic scrutiny, through whatever chromatic or achromatic lenses this village may focus upon me. Ah, but the mythus, — the real black beast is the mythus! The mythus begins with fact, and ends with philosophy. Walk wide of the mythus.

Mrs. Hawkins, a newcomer, refrains from relating her entire biography from the cradle until now. That, says the mythus, is because she is a grass widow. Mrs. Weaver is similarly reticent. The mythus explains that she ran away with her coachman. Miss Charity Ann is wan and pale. The mythus declares that she rues her betrothal to Jim Asa. Wilkins Glenn had a shoebox under his arm. Heaven help us, what had Wilkins Glenn in the shoebox ? A bottle of rum, says the mythus. The Little Giant walks down the north road. The rural mind, pouncing upon so important a morsel of information, elaborates it into an intellectual square meal. Watch the mythus a-cooking. The Little Giant, in walking down the north road, is headed for the post office. The Little Giant goes in quest of a letter. The letter is from a lady. The lady is young and rich and beautiful and indubitably adorable; else why should the Little Giant desire her letter ? The young and rich and beautiful and indubitably adorable lady is manifestly in love with the Little Giant, or she would never have written. “Jerusalem crickets!” the Little Giant is to be married directly.

Is not this the contrivance of genius ? We have here a hundred potential novelists ; we have thrice a hundred sleuthhounds, with throbbing hot Pinkerton blood in their veins.

Wendell Phillips was not far from right. The Puritan’s idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business. Sweet Auburn is heaven. We desire to behold you in cross-section, and we approximate success. We quiz you with shameless pertinacity. The Old Lady Goodspeed, having caught Helen in her web, said, “ Did he propose to you ? ” Helen was silent. “ Dew tell ; proposed to you, did he ? ” No answer. “ Waal, I want to know! Up an’ popped the question, an’ hain’t been keepin’ comp’ny more ’n a month ! Psho ! ” Still no reply. “ Then why on airth did n’t you accept him ? ” There is comfort in all this. It prepares one for Judgment Day. What possible inspection could be more pitilessly searching than the kind we already endure ?

Strange, you say, this insatiable interest in people ! Equally strange, say I, is your confession that when you lay ill in the hospital you counted the flies on the ceiling, and the flowers in the wall paper, and the panes of glass in the window sash. Sweet Auburn is a kind of hospital. To us, at least, nothing is trivial, no one insignificant. My neighbor is twenty feet tall. I have learned to tell his “ team ” a mile away. I know the jingle of his sleigh bells. I can recognize the beat of his horse’s hoofs at night. Mrs. Noah hastens to prayer meeting in winter time to see who is there, but in summer, when the windows are all open, she remains serenely at home ; she has trained her analytic ear to distinguish each particular voice, as the people sing. If a man passes while we are at table, we lean awry to peer out at him. When Mr. Clifton Johnson came into town with his camera, Sweet Auburn was eating its dinner. To my personal knowledge, all the Goodspeeds rushed from the table, and went down on their knees to peer under the parlor window blinds ; the Hezekiah household could be seen successively at three different sides of their homestead, and the Ichabods deployed upon their front “ stoop,” — still chewing. A stranger and a camera, — oh, the bliss !

No educational system in all this broad land produces intellects quite like ours. We can observe, we can remember, we can take time to think, we grapple a problem with the sort of canine tenacity that never lets go. Our genius is of the Teutonic order, — patient, prehensile, inerrant ; Sweet Auburn is a little Heidelberg. The trouble is, we lack discipline and we lack inspiration. The most magnificent possibilities lie undeveloped.

They will tell you in Sweet Auburn that all the nation’s great men were bred in the country, — wherein they are nearer right than wrong. Even here in our midst I could show you lads of unmistakable promise. Genius is nine parts character ; the prize is to him who dares, not merely to him who can ; the supreme desideratum is self-fulfillment. And the rigorous isolation of the farm, particularly in the period of childhood and early youth, fosters self - reliance, nurtures self-assertion, and crushes in its poisonous bud the impulse to sell one’s intellectual birthright by seeking to be another, and not one’s self. A mind so circumstanced knows no such thing as classicism ; it is romantic in its every motive. Therefore, under normal conditions, a gifted personality matured in isolation is the kind that will come to greatness when it meets an adequate opportunity. But the conditions of life in Sweet Auburn are not normal. Just here is the pathos of the hill town. We who are capable of appreciating the merits of Thackeray and Hawthorne and George Eliot are discoursing of bullocks. We who are susceptible to the fine inspirations of history and poetry and the varied study of nature are employing our bravest energies to determine what is inside Wilkins Glenn’s problematical shoebox. We live in an intellectual and social Sahara.

See, for instance, how the curse has fallen upon our æsthetic life ! There is not one good picture in our whole village, — no, not one. It is not so much that I abhor the tawdry crayon portraits, the cheap lithographs of Alderney heifers, and the flamboyant calendars. It is the pretentious substitutes for real art that stir my indignation. Our people become rapturously effervescent over the Bodenhausen Madonna reproduced on glass with a rococo edging of filmy gilt, and a prop to stand up by. Jim Asa, viewing that wonder, exclaims, “ Ain’t she slick ? ” And what of the long and narrow etchings by the indefatigable Field ? We cross ourselves before them with pious adoration. Yes, and the photographic marvels so lately put upon the bourgeois market, — groups of whitedraped figures holding lyres or trumpets or other pseudo-Hellenic symbols, — these too elicit our admiration. But chiefest is that shoddy Madonna. M. Charles Blanc says the test of artistic appreciation is to behold Raphael’s Stanze : if you weep, there is hope for you ; if you do not, why, eat, drink, and be merry, — to-morrow you die. Clearly, M. Charles Blanc had never seen the Bodenhausen Madonna reproduced on glass, with a prop to stand up by. That, thinks Sweet Auburn, is the ultimate criterion of taste.

Moreover, we are musical, after our uncouth fashion. There is an instrument of one kind or another in nearly every house. Indeed, I never saw a community where so many people could sing by note, or where so many could play. However, you will never hear it said in the hills that music has charms to soothe the savage breast; our music never soothes. It inebriates, but does not cheer. Still, having heard no better, we like it. Isolation is not good for music. See what has happened in China!

“ What do you think of aour choir ? ” asked Hezekiah. “Wa’n’t that solo a booster ? ”

“Well,” I replied, “Uncle Dwight has n’t what one would call a cultivated voice.”

“ Dunno ’baout that,” retorted the enthusiastic Hezekiah. “ Saoun’s as if he’d been over it at least once with a harrow! ”

And so it does. So, in truth, do the others. Nevertheless, our vocalists set forth upon heaven-scaling anthems with unexampled audacity.

Furthermore, we have developed a form of amateur theatricals known as the “ drammer.” There are gifted actors here and there in the hills : the “ drammer,” judiciously directed, might become a means of genuine culture; but left to go its own way, it degenerates into all sorts of vulgarity. The play itself is so inane, and at times so coarse, that it seems an insult to the human intellect that such unmitigated rubbish should exist.

Yet a fine play affords little opportunity for burnt cork and outrageous wigs and orange-colored Galway fringes ; and with us the actor’s make-up is a matter of the very first importance. Wilkins Glenn won undying fame, when playing Farmer Punkinseed, by covoring all his teeth save three with black wax, to simulate advanced age ; and there were not wanting those who believed that, such was his artistic sincerity, he had had his teeth drawn for that very occasion !

Such, then, is the higher life of Sweet Auburn, — versatile minds put to petty and unworthy uses, a native art instinct bowing down before vulgar mediocrity, a musical sense unconsciously outraged, a dramatic genius most grievously degraded. Sweet Auburn, as it stands today, is a great though a neglected opportunity.

III.

Somewhere in the city of Boston a Saratoga trunk is waiting to be packed. It will contain, among other things, an old violin, a sunshade hat, a case of pastels, a pair of hobnailed boots, and the works of William Morris. The baggage master, little appreciating the prophetic significance of what he is doing, will check that trunk to Sweet Auburn, Massachusetts.

Somewhere in Sweet Auburn an antique colonial homestead — weather-tinted to oxidized silver, and mossy-roofed with age — is standing untenanted. When Cyrus Glenn, the village carrier, sets down that particular trunk upon that particular doorstep, he too, like the Boston baggage master, will perform, though he know it not, an all but priestly function. For the arrival of your ponderous Saratoga means the advent of “ folks who write, and paint, and dream ; ” it means the epiphany of courage and vigor, and the culture of the soul ; it means the redemption of the rural waste, the revival of the hill town. Summer boarders ? By no means ! Social settlers you may choose to style yourselves ; but I, who have endured for so long a time the aching desolation of Sweet Auburn, prefer to call you the heralds of a new era, the founders of a state.

Sweet Auburn will receive you, as it received Mr. Clifton Johnson, with bucolic awe and curiosity. Mrs. Noah will call within twenty - four hours, to spy out the facts. Cyrus Glenn will be set upon at the village store, to render a complete inventory of the worldly goods he has carted from the station. Pretty Rachel, who delved in straw and excelsior unpacking your china, will suddenly become the most popular person in town. On Sunday the church will be packed with worshipers in search of “news.” Marvelous stories — factual, legendary, and mythologic — will lash the “stagnant goose pond ” into seething foam. It will promptly become the devouring ambition of every living soul in Sweet Auburn to force an entrance where angels (with city breeding) would fear to tread. In town, the problem is to “ get hold of the people ; ” here they get hold of you.

The Saratoga trunk will prove itself the ark of a new covenant. I would give the world to watch you while you open its treasures, and to watch our villagers standing by, in mingled surprise and delight. See ! Here is the pledge of a broad and beautiful and inspiring faith ; here the promise of the ministry of literature, and of music, and of art, and of travel; here, again, the possibility of renewed material prosperity.

I would give the world, too, if in some future day — not many years remote — I might return to Sweet Auburn and view the changes your unselfish efforts have wrought. Behold the reconstructed hill town !

We have sidewalks now, and street lamps, and a neatly kept common, and handsome hedges, and flower beds upon our lawns. A beautiful driveway encircles the lake, and a path goes winding to the top of every craggy hill. Moreover, we have forbidden the desecration of rural majesty by the soulless advertiser. The rocky face of Danger Cliff no longer proclaims the merits of Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, nor do a hundred mossy and lichened fences expound, as formerly, the total contents of the veterinary materia medica. We have modulated the polychromy of the “ meetin’haouse ” horse sheds, whose north facade was once an unrelieved mass of zebras, acrobats, apes, equilibrists, golden chariots, and educated donkeys. Best of all, we have acquired the antiquary enthusiasm of Old Deerfield, and preserved the pristine beauty of our venerable colonial homesteads. Queen Anne has already met with deposition. And the reason ? You have founded a village improvement society.

Ichabod, I find, has followed the example of a dozen other sturdy yeomen, and raised the mortgage on his farm. These amazing miracles, hitherto unheard of in the uplands, began to occur as soon as our people learned to rely upon the economic astuteness of their advisers at Kingsley Hall. We are no longer swindled by peddlers, no longer defrauded by far Western syndicates, no longer lured to financial destruction by “benefit orders,” — the Iron Hall, the Solid Rock, the Golden Fleece (well named) ; we no longer encourage our boys to marry on nothing a year ; we no longer incur the penalty of a glutted market by leaving our agricultural interests to the guidance of haphazard impulse. Coöperation (we pronounce the word with affectionate tenderness) has redeemed our ruined fortunes. We have learned to manage a coöperative creamery, a coöperative country store, a cooperative butcher shop, a coöperative bakery, and an effective scheme of cooperative production. Our novel prosperity has already enhanced the value of real estate. Newcomers of the most desirable sort are flocking into Sweet Auburn. We are the happiest town in the hills.

The Little Giant has found at Kingsley Hall a band of powerful allies. His “ meetin’ haouse ” — like the town hall and the district schoolhouses — has been tastefully decorated ; the choir, carefully reorganized and trained by residents at Kingsley, makes music fit for the worship of God; the gospel hymns have yielded precedence to the stately melodies of Barnby and Haydn and Händel; the Sunday-school library is replenished with the choicest children’s books in the world ; and the Little Giant’s flock have achieved so much in the way of social aptitude and facility that a church sociable at last deserves the name it bears. But, best of all, it is apparent that a higher type of Christianity has been developed. We have now an unmistakable public sentiment; we are escaping from individualism ; we have broader sympathies, finer impulses, a more extended ethical horizon, loftier and incomparably more beautiful ideals.

See ! I have shown you a vision. The prize is not merely the rejuvenation of the upland ; it is not merely its renaissance : it is the creation of a social order inconceivably finer than was ever yet known in the hills.

Your sphere of influence will extend far beyond Sweet Auburn. Forth by every highway will ride the vanguard of social conquest. Kingsley Hall will reduplicate its clubs and classes and Chautauqua coteries through half a county ; for twenty villages are readily accessible from your rustic capital. All shall be yours.

We stand, as it were, in the parting of the ways. Upward may we hill folk ascend into a noble humanity, or — as I showed in a former paper — descend to a pitiful degradation. Here there is set before your philanthropy an open door.

Rollin Lynde Hartt.