to travel hopefully is better than to
arrive. So let us come down, for, after all, "Love is of the valley."
Down again to the old town of Milton. We have not half begun to wander
over it: not half begun to hear the pleasant stories it has to tell.
When one is as old as this--for Milton was discovered by a band from
Plymouth who came up the Neponset River in 1621--one has many tales to
tell.

Of all the towns along the South Shore there are few whose feet are so
firmly emplanted in the economic history of the past and present as is
Milton. That peculiar odor of sweetness which drifts to us with a turn
of the wind, comes from a chocolate mill whose trade-mark of a
neat-handed maid with her little tray is known all over the civilized
world. And those mills stand upon the site of the first grist mill in
New England to be run by water power. This was in 1634, and one likes to
picture the sturdy colonists trailing into town, their packs upon their
backs, like children in kindergarten games, to have their grain ground.
Israel Stoughton was the name of the man who established this first
mill--a name perpetuated in the near-by town of Stoughton.

All ground is historic ground in Milton. That rollicking group of
schoolboys yonder belongs to an academy, which, handsome and
flourishing as it is to-day, was founded as long ago as 1787. That seems
long ago, but there was a school in Milton before that: a school held in
the first meeting-house. Nothing is left of this quaint structure but a
small bronze bas-relief, set against a stone wall, near its original
site. This early church and early school was a log cabin with a thatched
roof and latticed windows, if one may believe the relief, but men of
brains and character were taught there lessons which stood them and the
colony in good stead. One fancies the students' roving eyes may have
occasionally strayed down the Indian trail directly opposite the old
site--a trail which, although now attained to the proud rank of a lane,
Churchill's Lane, still invites one down its tangled green way along the
gray stone wall. Yes, every step of ground has its tradition here.
Yonder railroad track marks the spot where the very first tie in the
country was laid, and laid for no less significant purpose than to
facilitate the carrying of granite blocks for Bunker Hill Monument from
their quarry to the harbor.

Granite from the hills--the hills which swim forever against the sky and
march forever ab