We are so ancient that plenty of us remember the stone fireplace in the log-cabin, with its dusters for the hearth of buffalo tail and wild-turkey wing, with iron pot hung by a chain from the chimney hook, with pewter or wooden plates from which to eat with horn-handled knives and iron spoons. But yet are we so modern that we have fine new houses with bay windows, ornamental cupolas, and porches raving woodenly in that frettish fever which the infamous scroll-saw put upon fifty years of our land's domestic architecture. And these houses are furnished with splendid modern furniture, even with black walnut, gold touched and upholstered in blue plush and maroon, fresh from the best factories. Our fairly old people remember when they hunted deer and were hunted by the red Indian on our town site, while their grandchildren have only the memories of the town-born, of the cottage-organ, the novel railroad, and the two-story brick block with ornamental false front. In short, we round an epoch within ourselves, historically and socially. The country, however, keeps its first purity of charm, a country of little hills and little valleys lined with little quick rivers. These beauties, indeed, have not gone unsung. Years ago a woman poet eased her heart of ecstasies about this Little Country. "Here swells the river in its boldest course," she wrote, "interspersed by halcyon isles on which Nature has lavished all her prodigality in tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble bluffs three hundred feet high, their sharp ridges as exquisitely definite as the edge of a shell; their summits adorned with those same beautiful trees and with buttresses of rich rock, crested with old hemlocks that wear a touching and antique grace amid the softer and more luxuriant vegetation." Not spectacular, this--not sensational--not even unusual. Common enough little hills, as the world goes, with the usual ragged-edged village between them and the river, peopled by human beings entirely usual both in their outer and inner lives. It seems to be, indeed, not a place in which events could occur with any romantic fitness.