This is not a land of bold emprises; neither is it one of those localities which are said to be happy because they have no history. There is history in the very names of the villages hereabouts. Liberty, and Union, and Freedom; Equality, and Fraternity. And men will tell you how their fathers’ fathers came here in the train of General Knox, when that warrior, for Revolutionary services rendered, was given title to all the countryside; and how he sub-granted to his followers; and how they cleared farms, and tilled the soil, and lumbered out the forests, and exterminated deer and moose and bear. Seventy years ago, they will tell you, there was no big game hereabouts; but since then many farms, deserted, have been overrun by the forests; and the bear are coming back, and there are deer tracks along every stream, and moose in the swamps, and wildcats scream in the night. Twenty or thirty or forty miles to the north the big woods of Maine begin; so that this land is an outpost of the wilderness, thrust southward among the closer dwellings of man. The people of these towns are of ancient stock. The grandfathers of many of them came in with General Knox; most of them have been here for fifty years or more, they or their forbears. A few Frenchmen have drifted down from Quebec; a few Scotch and Irish have come in here as they come everywhere. Half a dozen British seamen escaped, once upon a time, from a man-of-war in Penobscot Bay, and fled inland, and were hidden away until their ship was gone. Whereupon they married and became part and parcel of the land, and their stock survives. By the mere reading of the names of these folk upon the R. F. D. boxes at their doors you may know their antecedents. Bubier and Saladine, Varney and Motley, McCorrison and MacLure, Thomas and Davis, Sohier and Brine--a five-breed blend of French and English, Scotch and Welsh and Irish; in short, as clear a strain of good Yankee blood as you are like to come upon. Sturdy folk, and hardy workers. You will find few idlers; and by the same token you will find few slavish toilers, lacking soul to whip a trout brook now and then or shoot a woodcock or a deer. Most men hereabouts would rather catch a trout than plant a potato; most men would rather shoot a partridge than cut a cord of wood. And they act upon their inclinations in these matters. The result is that the farms are perhaps a thought neglected; and no one is very rich in worldly goods; and a man who inherits a thousand dollars has come into money. Yet have they all that any man wisely may desire; for they have food and drink and shelter, and good comradeship, and the woods to take their sport in, and what books they choose to read, and time for solid thinking, and beauty ever before their eyes. Whether you envy or scorn them is in some measure an acid test of your own soul. Best hesitate before deciding.