Now the trolley car buzzes up and down the long steep slopes of Ponkapoag Hill and the automobiles honk in endless procession both ways. The old houses stand, but a new generation occupies them and the cosey, self-centered life of the old village has completely passed. Even the people who knew its traditions of a half-century ago are gone, too, and though the Christmas snow brought good coasting I doubt if it brought many coasters to the old hill. Yet Ponkapoag Hill was once famous in the region all about for its coasting and the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the Ponkapoag coasters. On days and nights in the old-fashioned winters, when the sledding of big logs to the sawmill on Ponkapoag brook had made the course down the hill one glare of adamantine snow between deep rifts, the population of the village used to turn out; not the big and little boys and girls only, but the grown-ups even to the venerable gaffers of those days who could remember how they used to coast there before the Civil War was thought of, when the Cherry Tavern still fed scores of pleasure-seeking Bostonians on big, luscious black-heart cherries each June, and in winter the Ponkapoag Inn had its patrons from the big city not only for coasting but for pickerel fishing on the pond. Modern easy methods of transportation and communication have put the typical New England village, with its manly, self-reliant, self-centered life, out of existence, and with it have passed or become decadent many of its community sports. I doubt if Ponkapoag will ever again see such coasting as it has seen, and I fancy the same may be truly said of hundreds of big hills in other towns. The sport still holds in one form or another, but it has changed. Coasting in the streets is rightly forbidden now in many communities. The chances of meeting dangerous obstructions in these days of multitudinous automobiles and omnipresent trolley cars are too great: In the old Ponkapoag days such things were unknown, and the rarely occasional sleigh or wood-sled was little to be feared. The drivers who were not coasting themselves knew the coasters had the right of way and "cleared the lulla" to let them by. There came nights like that of the Christmas just passed when the still, dry air intoxicated the coasters and carried their shouts far tinder the golden moon. Then there would be a constant procession of swiftly flying forms from the brow of the hill where Blue Hill loomed clear-cut against the velvet sky behind, to George B.'s blacksmith shop, at least. Certain flyers were fabled to go farther and, on perfect sledding, to make the gentle declivity clear to Potash Meadow and brook. Such as did this were famous the region through.