was an old man, shaken with palsy, and he
pushed a thing exactly like a pauper's burial-cart, selling pins, tape,
scents, and flavourings. You helped yourself, for his hands had no
direction, and he told a long tale in which the deeding away of a farm
to one of his family was mixed up with pride at the distances he still
could cover daily. As much as six miles sometimes. He was no Lear, as
the gift of the farm might suggest, but sealed of the tribe of the
Wandering Jew--a tremulous old giddy-gaddy. There are many such rovers,
gelders of colts and the like, who work a long beat, south to Virginia
almost, and north to the frontier, paying with talk and gossip for their
entertainment.

Yet tramps are few, and that is well, for the American article answers
almost exactly to the vagrant and criminal tribes of India, being a
predatory ruffian who knows too much to work. 'Bad place to beg in after
dark--on a farm--very--is Vermont. Gypsies pitch their camp by the river
in the spring, and cooper horses in the manner of their tribe. They have
the gypsy look and some of the old gypsy names, but say that they are
largely mixed with Gentile blood.

Winter has chased all these really interesting people south, and in a
few weeks, if we have anything of a snow, the back farms will be
unvisited save by the doctor's hooded sleigh. It is no child's play to
hold a practice here through the winter months, when the drifts are
really formed, and a pair can drop in up to their saddle-pads. Four
horses a day some of them use, and use up--for they are good men.

Now in the big silence of the snow is born, perhaps, not a little of
that New England conscience which her children write about. There is
much time to think, and thinking is a highly dangerous business.
Conscience, fear, undigested reading, and, it may be, not too well
cooked food, have full swing. A man, and more particularly a woman, can
easily hear strange voices--the Word of the Lord rolling between the
dead hills; may see visions and dream dreams; get revelations and an
outpouring of the spirit, and end (such things have been) lamentably
enough in those big houses by the Connecticut River which have been
tenderly christened The Retreat. Hate breeds as well as religion--the
deep, instriking hate between neighbours, that is born of a hundred
little things added up, brooded over, and hatched by the stove when two
or three talk together in the long evenings. It would be very
intere