T was a hill village on the stage road midway between and Stage roads in the year 1840 varied with the seasons from

bad to worse. In the spring they were rivers of mud, through which the jaded horses dragged the coach wearily; in the summer the passengers were choked with dust, and in the autumn, by reason of the ruts and holes in the road, they were tossed about like dice in a box; in winter the roads were blocked with snow, but the stage, when there was a stage, always came into our village with a clatter of galloping horses and sounding horn. Its round body, swung on leather straps, its gallant driver, its four smoking horses, and its merry horn were followed by shouting boys, who swung from the straps. of the boot or fell off in a cloud of

dust. The stage-driver was a personage in every village that depended on his arrival for the daily mail and the latest news from the outside world. He was gazed upon with awe by the children as a sort of hero of romance, who never worked, but drove galloping horses back and forth through a perpetual holiday. He was an expert with the reins whose reputation was counties wide. As he whirled up to the tavern porch, the leaders of his team, which, it was whispered, had been sold to the stage-company by the farmers because of their vicious tricks, walked around to the stable with drooping heads and into their familiar stalls as soon as their traces were unhooked, as innocentlooking as if they had never kicked a farmer's boy or picked up a groom by the collar.

How we admired the driver in his great

coat and buckskin gloves and traveled air as he strolled into the tavern, turning his back on the stable-boys, who trotted out his fresh horses, and how, when everything was ready, he mounted to his throne, gathered up the four reins, and dashed away to the sound of the horn!

Travel was at the parting of the ways. The passenger-packets were disappearing from the canals as the first railway trains were making their appearance on the new iron tracks, but the stage-driver, who cracked his whip at the one and snapped his fingers at the other, was still the king of the road.

At that time the county town or the nearest city afforded a local market for the produce of the surrounding community, which was a community of contentment and prosperity, hardly aware of dependence on the outside world. The fruits and spices of the tropics and the food from the sea found their way to these inland markets, the oysters in wooden kegs and tin cans, the ginger in ginger-jars swung in a network of rattan, and the white sugar in a tall, conical loaf wrapped in blue paper, which on state occasions was taken down from an upper shelf in the store-room and lumps were broken from it with a knife and a hammer.

The spinning-wheel was busy in every farm-house, where the wool was carded and spun and dyed for the men's socks and mittens. In every neighborhood was a loom for weaving rag-carpets, and in the winter evenings, and in the long summer days as well, old garments were cut into strips, sewed together, and wound into balls for the loom. Buyers came from a distance to bargain for the apples and for the wheat and the wool, and they chewed straws and whittled until the deal was completed. The tin peddler made frequent calls, driving a one-horse box-wagon, festooned with shining tin, ready to trade for paper, rags, dried fruit, or any other portable farm product; and if he "put up" for the night, he expected to pay for his keep in tinware.

The children on their way to school

carried baskets of eggs at ten cents a dozen and pails of butter at a shilling a pound to exchange for calico or tea or sugar at the village store. The districtschool-teacher, a young man in the winter and a young woman in the summer, "boarded around," stopping at each farmhouse two weeks at a time. There was another itinerant boarder for two or three days at a time, the old cracker baker, for whom the Dutch oven was made ready and the flour-barrel uncovered. The flourbarrel was an extra piece of coopering, with a cover that fitted over the top to keep out the dust, and stood in a dry chamber with an extra sack or two of fine flour when the cracker baker was due, ground and bolted at the nearest water mill. The traveling baker was a gruff old Norwegian with one white eye, who traveled in a wide circuit, for he came but once a year, and for fifty cents a day and his "keep" he left behind him a whole barrel of round crackers, dented with his elbow and stamped with his name, not to mention a half-barrel of gingersnaps.

I was born on the fourth of September, in the year 1840, in my great-grandmother's house in our village, which, with its surrounding farms, constituted just such an independent community as I have described. The village was dominated by a white church with a tall steeple, and most of its houses were strung out along the stage road like beads on a string. The church was a chapel of old Trinity, and the people were all Episcopalians. There was the tavern where the stages stopped, and opposite it stood an unused store, with a stairway on the side leading up to a study where a well-known historian was busy writing his first books. The tavern and the empty store and the church faced three sides of a little square where the boys played ball on week days, and which in a larger form extended back and around the church. On the tavern side of the square and facing the side wall of the church were two white houses, with lilac-bushes flanking the gates and flowerbordered walks to the front doors, and behind the church was the handsome house

of the historian in grounds well planted with selected shrubs and conical cedars. The entrance to the sloping graveyard was at the corner of the square, between the large house and the two small ones. On Sundays it was a favorite resort at noontime, to hunt for wild strawberries in the warm grass, and to sit on a broad, unlettered flat stone that rested on four low walls of masonry, one of which had crumbled away, and let a certain amount of light into the mysterious and nameless grave beneath. Hard by this slab of mystery was the upright stone of a soldier of the Revolutionary War who had been captured at Fort Washington and had sailed with Paul Jones, and whose adventures, written in picturesque English for his grandchildren, have since been published, and who should be noted as

the first literary person produced by our village.

The stage road, which crossed through the village in front of the church square, fell off as it passed the tavern and the stable-yard and the brick shop and rambling house of shoemaker Talmadge, until it came to the foot of the hill and the little red school-house in the valley.

On one side of the village street was the great house of the congressman, who was a Virginian, and quite the aristocrat of the village. Opposite his broad grounds were most of the other houses, beginning with the empty store, the rectory, the house and office of the doctor, the village store, and two more houses, the last of which faced on the cross-road, and was flanked by a red-brick blacksmith shop, no

longer a shop, but a tool-house. The real blacksmith shop was on the corner over the way, with the smith's house behind it, and both separated by a wide garden from the house of my great-grandmother, which was the easternmost house in the village. There were just eighteen houses in our

The

village, exclusive of
barns and shops and
offices, and counting
the church, the new
school-house, and the
cannon-house.
front door of every
dwelling-house was a
colonial door, with
fan-lights and side-
lights set in with lead-
ed glass, which suffi-
ciently indicated the
ancestry of the peo-
ple. Each door was
ornamented with a
brass knocker, for
bells had not yet been
heard of, and over
every door was an
oval tin sign bearing
the enigma "Ont. &
Liv. Mutual," show-
ing that a well-regu-
lated community of
two counties could

take care of its own insurance.

In front of the row of houses, between the church square and the cross-road, was a graveled sidewalk separated from the street by a continuous oak rail for hitching horses. There was a break in this railing in front of the store, and there were other openings where it was necessary to drive through to reach the barns. There were plain board fences in front of the houses, painted white, and the house line was ten paces back from the fence, not because the people of our village had any vulgar curiosity about the traffic of the street, but to make room at the back for lawns for battledore and shuttlecock and for gardens and stables, which latter afforded us boys no end of hiding-places when we played I-spy, with the "gould"

at the corner of the church.

It was a wide street through the village, with a considerable lawn in front of the congressman's big house, and at the head of the street near the tavern were a well with a sweep and scales for weighing hay.

The southwest corner of the four corners was the congressman's orchard of small fruits, inclosed by an upright board fence, painted black, with convenient cracks and knot-holes through which the ripe peaches and plums could be seen on the ground. The house on the southeast corner, which had never been painted, was guarded by a row of Lombardy poplars on each front. The white house on the diagonal corner, one of the two houses below the store, faced the stage road, with its unused colonial door and parlor windows darkened with green shades, but its other front was gay with potted geraniums in a recessed porch that was reached by stone steps in a whitewashed stone wall. On the cross-road to the north was another cottage, and opposite it the little red cannonhouse, in which was a cannon of the Mexican War mounted on a yellow guncarriage, with a yellow box, divided into squares for the cannon-balls, which fitted into its place in the double trail.

General training days were over, and this gun remained the visible evidence of the military past of the village. We boys crawled through a hole alongside the door to roll about the iron balls and to speculate on the romance of the old gun; and when we wondered if the village would ever be a city, we planned the growth of new houses, to begin at the cannon-house. There were other remains of general training to be found in the garrets of almost every house. There were uniforms of blue broadcloth lined with white merino, the narrow coat-tails looped together with silver bugles; cocked hats with plumes and high-crowned caps of beaver and brass; handsome swords with ivory hilts and chain-guards; horse pistols, London made; bridles with fringed leather head-stalls; and double bits and spurs, all of which had been in use within a dozen years.

Before I can remember, and during this period of changing from the old ways to the new, my parents had removed to the farm, half a mile beyond the cannonhouse, that was the northern limit of the village. I was a favorite of my greatgrandmother and of my Aunt Mary Ann, and quite my earliest recollections are of the house where I was born. It was screened from the road by a row of Lombardy poplars growing within the dooryard fence. It was from the tender sprouts of these trees that "big men" made me whistles with a fragrant, bitter smell and a slightly bitter taste, which, however, never lessened my delight in blowing the whistles. How well I remember the peculiar, pungent odor of the poplar whip, which was the new growth, as the big man girdled and tapped the bark with his jackknife until it slid off the sappy wood and slid back again a whistle!

Of my five senses, as I recall conditions at that early period, I believe that my sense of smell was the keenest, for it is the vivid recollection of the odor of things that appeals first to my memory. My great-grandmother's place was a bouquet of pungent smells, and is still a bouquet in my memory that has not yet lost its distinguishing odors. There was the "black apple-tree" in the first row of the orchard, the purple-red fruit of which, lying in the warm grass, had a spicy, sweet smell that drew the wasps and the bees until its shade was a danger zone; and equally distinctive was the fragrance of the harvest apples that fell from the tree with the sloping trunk at the corner of the orchard. My aunt's flower-beds of dahlias and marigolds and poppies had a inedicinal smell. dicinal smell. The woodhouse chamber, where I played with wooden clock-wheels made fast to discarded dials, had a smell of its own, fascinating, but quite indescribable.

There were a dark closet under the hall stairs where the hickory nuts were kept, together with the round lap-stone on which my aunt cracked them, and the closed parlor where my grandmother kept the platter of molasses candy, made with her own