"Or Thanksgiving," said I. But "Thanksgiving" suggests no picture to Jack as it does to you and me. Our cranberry sauce in England is always a failure, not thick or sweet enough; and the poor fellow has _never tasted pumpkin pie_! If one of them came into his life, he would probably address it as it is spelt; and what self-respecting pumpkin pie would be luscious unless it were pronounced "punkin?" "Anyhow, I give Vermont a star," he murmured, with the look of pinning a V. C. onto a mountain's breast. And he did that just in time, for the mountains were receding into the background, taking hands in a ring round wide woodlands. By way of the pretty toy town Arlington we came to Bennington, which is the heart of history for Vermont. The man for whom it was named was granted the first township in the wild lands known as "the Wilderness" then. But it must have been a beautiful wilderness, for the British soldiers of those pre-Revolutionary days used to fall in love with it as they marched through, and promise themselves that they would come back and build homes. They did come back and build the homes, and the "promised land" was so attractive that New York wanted to take it away by writ of ejectment. The Vermonters decided to fight for their rights under Ethan Allen, and thus "The Green Mountain Boys" came into existence as a famous band. The bronze catamount which still grins defiance toward New York from the top of its tall pedestal makes that day seem yesterday! There's a great monument also, to the battle which made Bennington's glory, but the most _humanly_ interesting thing in town--for us--was the old Robinson house. Such a darling house, with a heavenly door and scalloped white picket fence. You would love it! And it's turned itself into a kind of glorified curiosity shop, as so many of the charming old houses of New England have done. You feel you must go in to see what these lovely houses are like inside; and the first thing you know, you are buying Queen Anne mirrors, japanned trays, braided mats, and even serpentine fronted bureaux, which you don't know what to do with but die rather than do without! Everything else that we saw was a "star" place after that, for we were coming back into Massachusetts, and to the Berkshire Hills which Thoreau loved, and Hawthorne, and Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Williamstown is as celebrated in its smaller way as Harvard or Yale, for a university's fame needn't consist in size, I suppose! I hardly ever saw a place where every building was so perfectly suited to every other building, without one jarring note; and though it's more important than a village now, the lovely description Hawthorne wrote suits the town as well as ever. He said: "I had a view of Williamstown from Greylock summit: a white village and a steeple in a gradual hollow, with huge mountain swells heaving up, like immense subsiding waves far and near around it."