indeed, a vehicle of any
sort. A century ago Beartown was a thriving community, producing many
thousand dollars' worth of grain, maple sugar, wool, and mutton. To-day
there are less than half a dozen families left, and they survive by cutting
cord wood from the sheep pastures! We must haul our wool from the
Argentine, and our mutton from Montana, while our own land goes back to
unproductive wilderness. As the road draws near the long hill down into
Monterey, there stands a ruined house beside it, one of many ruins you will
have passed, the plaster in heaps on the floor, the windows gone, the door
half fallen from its long, hand-wrought hinges. It is a house built around
a huge central chimney, which seems still as solid as on the day it was
completed. The rotted mantels were simply wrought, but with perfect lines,
and the panelling above them was extremely good. So was the delicate
fanlight over the door, in which a bit of glass still clings, iridescent
now like oil on water. Under the eaves the carpenter had indulged in a
Greek border, and over the woodshed opening behind he had spanned a
keystone arch. Peering into this shed, under the collapsing roof, you see
what is left of an axe embedded in a pile of reddish vegetable mould, which
was once the chopping block. Peering through the windows of the house, you
see a few bits of simple furniture still inhabiting the ruined rooms. Just
outside, in the door-yard, the day lilies, run wild in the grass, speak to
you of a housewife's hand across the vanished years. The barn has gone
completely, overthrown and wiped out by the advancing forest edge. Enough
of the clearing still remains, however, to show where the cornfields and
the pastures lay. They are wild with berry stalks and flowers now, still
and vacant under the Summer sun.

The ruins of war are melancholy, and raise our bitter resentment. Yet how
often we pass such an abandoned farm as this without any realization that
it, too, is a ruin of war, the ceaseless war of commercial greed. No less
surely than in stricken Belgium has there been a deportation here.
Factories and cities have swallowed up a whole population, indeed, along
the Beartown road. It is easy to say that they went willingly, that they
preferred the life of cities; that the dreary tenement under factory grime,
with a "movie" theatre around the corner, is an acceptable substitute to
them for the ample fireplaces, the fanlight door, the rolling fields and