, along which all the houses were clustered with a somewhat dreary
uniformity of aspect, one might of a summer's day hear the rumble of the
town mill in some adjoining valley, busy with the town grist; in autumn,
the flip-flap of the flails came pulsing on the ear from half a score of
wide-open barns that yawned with plenty; and in winter, the clang of
axes on the near hills smote sharply upon the frosty stillness, and
would be straightway followed by the booming crash of some great tree.

But civilization and the railways have debauched all such quiet,
stately, steady towns. There are none of them left. If the iron cordon
of travel, by a little divergence, has spared their quietude, leaving
them stranded upon a beach where the tide of active business never
flows, all their dignities are gone. The men of foresight and enterprise
have drifted away to new centres of influence. The bustling dames in
starched caps have gone down childless to their graves, or, disgusted
with gossip at second hand, have sought more immediate contact with the
world. A German tailor, may be, has hung out his sign over the door of
some mouldering mansion, where, in other days, a doughty judge of the
county court, with a great raft of children, kept his honors and his
family warm. A slatternly "carryall," with a driver who reeks of bad
spirit, keeps up uneasy communication with the outside world, traversing
twice or three times a day the league of drive which lies between the
post-office and the railway-station. A few iron-pated farmers, and a few
gentlemen of Irish extraction who keep tavern and stores, divide among
themselves the official honors of the town.

If, on the other hand, the people maintain their old thrift and
importance by actual contact with some great thoroughfare of travel,
their old quietude is exploded; a mushroom station has sprung up;
mushroom villas flank all the hills; the girls wear mushroom hats. A
turreted monster of a chapel from some flamboyant tower bellows out its
Sunday warning to a new set of church-goers. There is a little coterie
of "superior intelligences," who talk of the humanities, and diffuse
their airy rationalism over here and there a circle of the progressive
town. Even the meeting house, which was the great congregational centre
of the town religion, has lost its venerable air, taken off by some new
fancy of variegated painting. The high, square pews are turned into
low-backed seats, that flame on a sum