Monday dawned on Hometown. It found me up and doing. I had enjoyed one week of glorious loafing, but work was the programme for the next. I went to Draper’s Inn and engaged a horse and buggy “until further notice.” “A spang-up team” he called it, and it would be up “in half a jiffy.” We were waiting for it when it came, and what with our variety of luggage in the shape of canvases, color-boxes, hammocks, camp-seats, and easels, every bit of available space in that buggy was well utilized. Before the clock has struck nine, we are spinning along down through the village, now past the store, now over the bridge, and turning to the right, we glide by the little post-office, as the kind face of Father Tomlinson nods a “good-bye” from the door-way. A little farther, and we have left the little slope-roofed school-house in our path, and are soon ascending the long hill of Zoar, from which we look back four miles to the cliff and nestling town. In ten minutes more we approach the brow of a steep declivity, and the broad Housatonic opens up to view, winding off into the misty mountains in the distance. There is now a drive of half a mile along the side of a wild mountain-slope, where mountain-laurels grow in wild profusion, and the rooty, overhanging banks are tufted with rich green moss, overgrown with checker-berries and arbutus. The river roars far down below us, and for a few minutes our eyes feast on as lovely an extent of varied New England landscape as is easily found. And yet this is only a short section of one of the many matchless drives that follow the course of this beautiful river around the borders of Hometown. [Illustration: FAMILIAR FACES AT THE VILLAGE STORE.] Suddenly we leave the stream as it glides away on an abrupt turn beneath the crescent of a rocky precipice, and before we have fairly lost the sound of the ripples we have arrived at our journey’s end. A pair of bars under an old butternut-tree mark the place. The carriage is backed to the side of the road, and the horse turned loose in the rocky meadow. This is Joab Nichols’s “pasture lot,” with fodder consisting principally of huge boulders, hardhack, and spleenwort; to be sure, with a stray relish of “butter-and-eggs” here and there, and a thousand white saucers of wild carrot handy to go with them. One or two trips across the field bring all our luggage, and we are soon enjoying cool comfort in the hemlock shade of a fairy grotto. Above us the babbling brook bounds and splashes over mossy rocks, disappearing in a mass of creamy foam, from under which it eddies toward us only to plunge twenty feet into a miniature cañon below. Again, yonder it bubbles into a whirling pool, where the bordering ferns bend and nod above its buoyant surface; and now gliding from view beneath the tangle of drooping boughs, it disappears only to burst forth once more in its merry song as it rushes over the rapids.