e in the harassed and weary modern world,
we love that life, and yet we are the least afraid to leave it.

It is usually dark when the shabby little narrow-gauge train brings us
home to Hillsboro from wanderings in the great world, and the big pond by
the station is full of stars. Up on the hill the lights of the village
twinkle against the blurred mass of Hemlock Mountain, and above them the
stars again. It is very quiet, the station is black and deserted, the road
winding up to the village glimmers uncertainly in the starlight, and dark
forms hover vaguely about. Strangers say that it is a very depressing
station at which to arrive, but we know better. There is no feeling in the
world like that with which one starts up the white road, stars below him
in the quiet pool, stars above him in the quiet sky, friendly lights
showing the end of his journey is at hand, and the soft twilight full of
voices all familiar, all welcoming.

Poor old Uncle Abner Rhodes, returning from an attempt to do business in
the city, where he had lost his money, his health, and his hopes, said he
didn't see how going up to Heaven could be so very different from walking
up the hill from the station with Hemlock Mountain in front of you. He
said it didn't seem to him as though even in heaven you could feel more
than then that you had got back where there are some folks, that you had
got back home.

Sometimes when the stars hang very bright over Hemlock Mountain and the
Necronsett River sings loud in the dusk, we remember the old man's speech,
and, though we smile at his simplicity, we think, too, that the best which
awaits us can only be very much better but not so very different from what
we have known here.

PETUNIAS--THAT'S FOR REMEMBRANCE

It was a place to which, as a dreamy, fanciful child escaping from
nursemaid and governess, Virginia had liked to climb on hot summer
afternoons. She had spent many hours, lying on the grass in the shade of
the dismantled house, looking through the gaunt, uncovered rafters of the
barn at the white clouds, like stepping-stones in the broad blue river of
sky flowing between the mountain walls.

Older people of the summer colony called it forlorn and desolate--the
deserted farm, lying high on the slope of Hemlock Mountain--but to the
child there was a charm about the unbroken silence which brooded over the
little clearing. The sun shone down warmly on the house's battered shell
and through the st