Jays, the Sniffens date back to when the acres of
the first Charles Ferris ran from the Boston post road to the coach road
to Albany, and when the first Gouverneur Morris stood on one of his
hills and saw the Indian canoes in the Hudson and in the Sound and
rejoiced that all the land between belonged to him.

If you do not believe in heredity, the fact that Jimmie's
great-great-grandfather was a scout for General Washington and hunted
deer, and even bear, over exactly the same hills where Jimmie hunted
weasels will count for nothing. It will not explain why to Jimmie, from
Tarrytown to Port Chester, the hills, the roads, the woods, and the
cowpaths, caves, streams, and springs hidden in the woods were as
familiar as his own kitchen garden.

Nor explain why, when you could not see a Pease and Elliman "For Sale"
sign nailed to a tree, Jimmie could see in the highest branches a last
year's bird's nest.

Or why, when he was out alone playing Indians and had sunk his scout's
axe into a fallen log and then scalped the log, he felt that once before
in those same woods he had trailed that same Indian, and with his own
tomahawk split open his skull. Sometimes when he knelt to drink at a
secret spring in the forest, the autumn leaves would crackle and he
would raise his eyes fearing to see a panther facing him.

"But there ain't no panthers in Westchester," Jimmie would reassure
himself. And in the distance the roar of an automobile climbing a hill
with the muffler open would seem to suggest he was right. But still
Jimmie remembered once before he had knelt at that same spring, and that
when he raised his eyes he had faced a crouching panther. "Mebbe dad
told me it happened to grandpop," Jimmie would explain, "or I dreamed
it, or, mebbe, I read it in a story book."

The "German spy" mania attacked Round Hill after the visit to the boy
scouts of Clavering Gould, the war correspondent. He was spending the
week-end with "Squire" Harry Van Vorst, and as young Van Vorst, besides
being a justice of the peace and a Master of Beagles and President of
the Country Club, was also a local "councilman" for the Round Hill
Scouts, he brought his guest to a camp-fire meeting to talk to them. In
deference to his audience, Gould told them of the boy scouts he had seen
in Belgium and of the part they were playing in the great war. It was
his peroration that made trouble.

"And any day," he assured his audience, "this country may be at war wi