ose newer parts of our continent names have too
often lost the flavor of history; have, in truth, done so, save in
isolated instances. The "Smithtons" and "Griggsby Stations" are
monotonous and uninteresting, and the Tombstones are little short of
sacrilege. In the crush of movers' wagons there appeared to be a
scramble for names of any sort. Places multiply, imagination is
asleep, and names nearest at hand are most readily laid hold of; yet,
even in such a dearth of originality and poetry, scant names flash out
which remind you of the morning names in our continent's history. A
Springdale reminds you that colonists here found a dale, gladdened with
living springs; or an Afton suggests how some exiled Scot salved his
heart by keeping near his exile a name he loved. Our day will, in the
main, attach names for simple convenience, as they put handles on
shovels. Such names, of course, are meaningless. The day for
inventing names is past, or seems so. We beg or borrow, as the
surveyor who marched across the State of New York, with theodolite and
chain and a classical atlas, and blazed his way with Rome, and Illyria,
and Syracuse, and Ithaca,--a procedure at once meaningless and dense.
Greece nor Rome feels at home among us, nor should they.

History is a method of remembrance, and names are a method of
remembrance also, the two conspiring to the same end. When the Saxon,
sailing across seas, found a rude home in England, he named his new
home Saxonland, and there are East and West and South Saxons; and so,
Essex and Wessex and Sussex. In like manner, emigrants from various
shores across the grim Atlantic kept the memory and names of that dear
land from which they sailed; and by running your eyes over those
earlier colonies, you shall see names--aboriginal and imported--and so
learn, in an infallible way, who first pitched tents on that soil.
This tracking dead races over seas by the local designations they have
left has always fascinated my thought. Those names are verily planted
in the earth, and grow like trees that refuse to die. Through
centuries of turbulence and slaughter and racial transplanting, see how
some Roman words stay and refuse to go, knowing as little of retreat as
a Roman legion! "Chester" and "coin," as good old English terminals,
are tense with interest, since they as plainly record history as did
minstrels in old castle hall. Chester is the Roman "castra," camp, and
where the name occurs a