He sat down by the stove and went to whittling some shavings. He had not yet got on either shoes or stockings. One by one the rest of the family straggled in, and the fire began to glow and the heat to drive out the frostiness of the kitchen atmosphere. Outdoors the weather was threatening, and there were little drives of sleet borne down on the wings of the wind. After breakfast I concluded to leave this land of winter and followed down one of the steep roads into the autumn region of the Deerfield valley. By brisk travelling I succeeded by close of day in getting to the quiet meadows along the Connecticut. It had been a five days’ journey. I saw only a little patch of New England, and the description is necessarily fragmentary; but at least there is presented characteristic phases of its nature and life as the traveller on a leisurely journey may see them. [Illustration: ONE OF THE OLD VILLAGE STREETS] PART IV CAMPING AMONG THE NEW ENGLAND HILLS It was a warm night of midsummer. In a secluded hollow of the Green Mountain ranges of lower Vermont was pitched a small white tent. A half-moon was shining softly through the light cloud-hazes overhead, and had you been there, you could have made out the near surroundings without much difficulty. Tall woods were all about, but here was a little open where grasses and ferns and low bushes grew in abundance, and on a chance level of the steep, uneven hillside the campers had pitched their tent. In the deep, tree-filled ravine close below was a stream, whence came the sound of its fretting among the rocks, and from a little farther up the solemn pounding of a waterfall. From the other direction came a different sound. It was the gentle clinking of a hammer on an anvil. On the farther side of the narrow strip of woods, which shut it from sight, was a farmhouse, and it was thence came the sound of hammering. [Illustration: THE HOUSE WITH THE BARN ACROSS THE ROAD] [Illustration: A WARM SUMMER DAY] The tent has two occupants. They are both young fellows, who had on the day previous started from their Boston homes for a vacation trip to the woods. In the city they were clerks,--one in a store, the other in a bank. The chance that brought them to this particular spot for their vacation was this: a school friend of theirs, who was blessed (or perhaps otherwise) with more wealth than they, and who was next year to be a senior in Harvard, had informed them a few weeks previous that his folks were going to the Groveland House for the summer. This, he said, was in the centre of one of the prettiest and most delightful regions of all New England, and he urged his friends, Clayton and Holmes, to by all means go along too. He expatiated on the beauties of the place with such an eloquence (whether natural or acquired at Harvard, I know not) that these two gave up the idea of a trip they had been planning down the coast and turned their thoughts inland.