"On the town!" The phrase haunted me. I walked home past the golf links, where comfortable males in knickerbockers were losing 75-cent balls, past two estates that cost a hundred thousand dollars apiece, past the groggy signpost which pointed to Albany and Twin Fires, and saw my own pleasant acres, with the white house above the orchard slope, the ghost of Rome in roses marching across the sundial lawn, the fertile tillage beyond. Far off in every direction stretched the green countryside to the ring of hills. Why should anybody, in such a pleasant land, be "on the town?" Why should some of us own acres upon acres of this land and others own nothing? None of us made the land. None of us cleared it, won it from the wilderness. If any white men had a right to it to-day, surely they would be the descendants of the original pioneers. Yet one of those descendants now did our washing, and owned but a scrubby acre of the great tract which had once stood in her ancestor's name. Why had the acres slipped away in the intervening generations? In that case, I knew. The land had gone to pay for the liquor which had devastated the stock. In other cases, no doubt, a similar cause could be found. Then, too, in many cases the best blood of the families had gone away to feed the cities--to make New York great. The weaker blood had remained behind, not to mingle with fresh blood, but to cross too often with its own strain, till something perilously close to degeneracy resulted. "On the town!" The town had once been a community of hardy pioneers, all firm in the iron faith of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, all independent and self-respecting, even though they did call themselves "poor worms" on the Sabbath. The faith and the independence alike were gone. They bled the town for little jobs, badly done, to keep out of the poorhouse. The rugged pioneer community had become, I suddenly saw, a rural backwater. The great tide of agricultural prosperity had swept on to the West; industrial prosperity had withdrawn into the cities. We, in rural New England, were entering the twentieth century with a new problem on our hands. And I felt utterly helpless to solve it. But it has never since then ceased to be troublesome in the background of my consciousness, and when I see the road work being done by "town labour," I think of what that means; I think of the farms abandoned to summer estates or weeds, the terrible toll of whiskey and cider, the price the city has exacted of the country, the pitiful end of these my brothers of the Pilgrim breed. I reflect that even in Twin Fires we cannot escape the terrible problems of the modern world. This is the leaden lining to that silver cloud which floats in the blue above our dwelling. Chapter XXV HORAS NON NUMERO NISI SERENAS