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Graveyards still cumber the business portion of a New England city"

New Style." Salem, once a port, is now a factory. Boston, enriched by its East India trade, has seen a richer trade supplant it. Along the coast of Maine shipbuilding has declined, yet the lobster has risen in price from a nickel to sometimes a dollar, and the sea is "red with him," while the shore is green with summer

boarders. In Gloucester, where Kipling's "captains courageous" have turned NovaScotian or Portuguese, New-Englanders find better jobs on land.

This racial transition, as noticeable elsewhere in New England, what will it make her? New France? New Palestine? New Erin? Whole towns seem

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French-Canadian. Save for Scotch-Canadian trained nurses, New England would die of her "never-get-overs." Hebrews increase and multiply; one hears of "Harvard Jewniversity." If Germans are rare, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians abound. The Children's Settlement in Boston attracts twenty-two different nationalities. Alien anarchists. hunted out of Paterson, New Jersey, took refuge in New England. Lawrence is a foreign legion, a Midway, a Babel; its device, "No God, no country." Thus far, however, only the Irish have come as conquerors. They are everywhere; as my friend Terence would say, "All the harps from here to heaven, an' divil a native dares touch wan av thim."

Of necessity Boston's mayor is Irish. Among the stateliest new churches in New England many are Catholic. The lovely new English Gothic tower on University Heights surmounts an Irish college. Socially, a vague barrier separates cultivated Irish families from cultivated New England families; it is vanishing; soon it will be no more. Once cross it, and you find the Irish spirit not only buoyant, but modest. In an old New England town, while dining with an Irish household, I spoke of my adventures in the steerage during a penniless trip abroad years ago. "Don't mention the steerage!" cried my hostess. "We're too near it!" There, in her dignified mansion, with all her cultivation and brilliancy and charm, she could say that!

New Erin is not impending. It has arrived. Yet, although stimulated somewhat by Irish jollity and pluck and tormented somewhat by Irish politicians, New England remains unchanged. Themselves conquered, the conquerors have become New-Englanders, and here and there the most devout conservators of beans and the broad a.

But meanwhile a subtler invasion proceeds from New York City. If Rhode Island has its Newport, the New England hills have a dozen. There are Bostonians whose dream is to dance in pink coats at a hunt ball. A new aristocracy,

with Fifth Avenue ideals, has sprung up alongside the old aristocracy of blue blood. Nor is this all. New York magazines and newspapers, New York plays, and New York fashions tend gradually to undermine New England traditions. Comic weeklies published in New York ridicule. New England. Read once, the jokes prompt only some such retort as "You think so, do you? Then the laugh is on you." Read a hundred times, they breed a definite uneasiness. Moreover, renegade New-Englanders return from "the city," and jeer New England's conservatism. That cuts. It is dangerously near "twitting on facts."

True, New England's old-fogy stone walls are fast coming down, to make villas for outsiders. Her ancient farm-houses catch fire and are not rebuilt. Her ancient stage-coaches are being replaced by motors. The village "store," once crammed with everything from Bunker Hill chocolate-drops to beaver hats demoded in the days of Daniel Webster, has fallen victim to the mail-order atrocity. But deer now and then invade her towns. Rattlesnakes still lurk in her hills. Not long ago an owl spent a happy week on the flagstaff over Boston's city hall. Here and there a town-crier survives. Here and there a great, swollen population remains a village, with "selectmen" and an annual town-meeting. Cambridge has not yet outgrown its countless, clamorous firebells. Graveyards still cumber the business portion of a New England city. These picturesque antiquities, all told, are a shock and a grief to strangers visiting New England. Oh, logical strangers! Having come for glimpses of Plymouth Rock, Concord, Lexington, and the House of Seven Gables, they rail at a New England somewhat less than up to date and "classy." Logic or no logic, it strikes them that New England, the home of reformers, is of all American or pseudoAmerican communities the one most needing reform.

Well, perhaps. She treasures some comical enough railways, some scandalous prisons, and, in Massachusetts, a system

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land may seem about as placid an adventure as adopting a maiden aunt, but I shall not defend my course by citing the specious fling, "In New England the main thing lacking is New England." Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa, and the far Northwest, SO one hears, have communities more "New Englandy" than Massachusetts itself. All her life my grandmother was an intense New-Englander, having been exposed to New England for the first time at the age of eighty-seven. Yet if there are colonists more loyal than the king, his Majesty is not on that account a traitor.

"Gumption," humor, "hoss-sense," and principle, with a saving dash of the Old Nick, still thrive in New England. To these add versatility. She wins base-ball pennants and literary prizes, is more and more a factory, more and more a park, more and more a school. Among her notables, what variety! A Charles W. Eliot and a John L. Sullivan; a Brandeis, a Lodge, a Lawson, a Gelett Burgess. She is all ages; where four New-Englanders meet, four centuries may also meet. For, while there are natives living in the days of Increase Mather, of John Hancock, of Tom Reed, or of Ralph Adams Cram, not a few inhabit the twenty-first century. Anywhere in New England talk enlists contributions from Heaven knows how many different periods. Often they unite in the same person, here a Puritan, there a Bohemian, in spots a Briton, with traces of the scholar, the philistine, and the wag; he is a moral and intellectual condensed vaudeville. I love him.

To an outsider the past speaks loudest. The native, however antiquated temperamentally, regards it but little. When Ponkahassett announces its two-hundredand-fiftieth anniversary, he exclaims, "Where in creation is Ponkahassett?" When a tootle of trumpets from the belfry at "Brimstone Corner" makes pedestrians glance up, they mutter perplexedly, "Is it a hundred years since something?" In New England the historic is a kind of stage scenery, a genial background for living figures. Barring the flies that come. down its immense chimneys, I enjoyed my

century-old house; as a student, I enjoyed idling in Thanatopsis Glen; later on, it was pleasant to stroll past a mansion where Dr. Smith wrote "My Country 't is of Thee" and another where Mrs. Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or to look out on Lowell's "Elmwood" or on the Old South Meeting-house. New England's May baskets, her Christmas waits and Christmas candles, her Hallowe'en witches, her "licensed victuallers," and her "Private Ways, Dangerous," her immemorial proverbs and counting-out rhymes, her family crests, her "shag" cats descended from Persian Tabithas brought home by ancient mariners long dead, her steamboats named for Puritan worthies and characters in Longfellow-fascinating, all that. But I soon ceased to think New England a class in archæology. She is too sizzling a caldron of modern, not to say ultra-modern, American ideas, and some without kindred, date, or country.

A Danish baron (of whom the less told, the better) once remarked to me: "I understand your liking for New England. I, too, prefer to live in another country near my own," yet I withheld the expected "Amen." True, New England is near America. Moreover, Americans. flock there, "city" people stoutly repeating "N' York's the place," plainsmen grumbling because hills "shut them in" and the sea "wiggles and makes them nervous," Southerners out of temper with the one Boston hotel that would lodge the maker of Tuskegee. To them New England seems foreign, whereas of all communities it is the most compendiously American, summing up America's whole past, illustrating its whole present, so that every American impulse leaves somewhere its mark upon New England's mind and character. Never once have I felt like an expatriate. And I notice among scoffers a vague envy of the native. Have they an uncle by marriage whose second cousin thrice removed possessed a great-grandfather who was born in New England? The scandal is not concealed.

Step up, gallants! The national wallflower is past her first youth, I grant you,

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him and bade them name the defect in his picture. They studied it, debated it, applied this test and that, but reached no verdict until finally one of them cried out: "Ah, I have it! It lacks a certain Genesee squaw." In New England, the "certain Genesee squaw" is the chief of many virtues. You value New-Englanders less for what they know than for what they have. forgotten, less for what they say and do than for their frequent mastery of the fine and delicate art of being. In New Eng

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