said, three years before,
that the New Hampshire highlands was a good place. He was right--it was
a good place. Any place that is good for an artist in paint is good
for an artist in morals and ink. Brush is here, too; so is Col. T. W.
Higginson; so is Raphael Pumpelly; so is Mr. Secretary Hitchcock; so is
Henderson; so is Learned; so is Summer; so is Franklin MacVeigh; so is
Joseph L. Smith; so is Henry Copley Greene, when I am not occupying
his house, which I am doing this season. Paint, literature, science,
statesmanship, history, professorship, law, morals,--these are all
represented here, yet crime is substantially unknown.

The summer homes of these refugees are sprinkled, a mile apart, among
the forest-clad hills, with access to each other by firm smooth country
roads which are so embowered in dense foliage that it is always twilight
in there, and comfortable. The forests are spider-webbed with these good
roads, they go everywhere; but for the help of the guide-boards, the
stranger would not arrive anywhere.

The village--Dublin--is bunched together in its own place, but a good
telephone service makes its markets handy to all those outliars. I
have spelt it that way to be witty. The village executes orders on, the
Boston plan--promptness and courtesy.

The summer homes are high-perched, as a rule, and have contenting
outlooks. The house we occupy has one. Monadnock, a soaring double hump,
rises into the sky at its left elbow--that is to say, it is close at
hand. From the base of the long slant of the mountain the valley spreads
away to the circling frame of the hills, and beyond the frame the
billowy sweep of remote great ranges rises to view and flows, fold upon
fold, wave upon wave, soft and blue and unwordly, to the horizon fifty
miles away. In these October days Monadnock and the valley and its
framing hills make an inspiring picture to look at, for they are
sumptuously splashed and mottled and be-torched from sky-line to
sky-line with the richest dyes the autumn can furnish; and when they lie
flaming in the full drench of the mid-afternoon sun, the sight affects
the spectator physically, it stirs his blood like military music.

These summer homes are commodious, well built, and well furnished--facts
which sufficiently indicate that the owners built them to live in
themselves. They have furnaces and wood fireplaces, and the rest of
the comforts and conveniences of a city home, and can be comfortably
occu