"What are you city people for, but to be skinned?" was the frank remark of one of my nearest country neighbors one day, apropos of an outrageous bit of sharp dealing on his part as property appraiser for that district. It was not a flattering summing up of a relationship, nor did its grim humor hide any more indulgent version of our economic value as neighbors. In fact we were not, nor ever had been accepted by him and his kind as neighbors. We were a crop. A crop more lucrative than his potatoes, but from our arbitrary and unexpected demands, and the shortness of our seasons, and the variation of our types a much more "pernickery" crop to deal with. Perhaps I should have been flattered by his frankness, but I was not! For the moment indeed, I even resolved to deal no more with him or his, but on second thought I concluded that, although he would be the loser of some $200, I would be out a wash-woman, a chore boy, many dozens of fresh eggs, many quarts of milk, a care-taker for the house during the winter, and an immunity from his cows in my garden in the summer. In fact, I stood to lose double as much as he, if peace of mind and leisure to enjoy my home could be computed in hard cash. I concluded therefore that it would not pay to get mad. But the remark rankled and in the end set this and that motive to work in my mind until my brain and heart became fallow ground for the cultivation of another sort of relationship than that of city folk and native, buyer and seller, employer and employed, or even giver and receiver. In the end we learned to be neighbors--he and I--not because his ground adjoined mine, but because we both began to feel a common civic interest in the same village and in the same country side, and because in a very particular and picturesque sense we both shared in an enterprise from which we both derived comfort and pleasure. The change in me was greater than the change in him for he had always been interested in the village life apart from his property, and apart from his comfort, and during all the year. The bond that brought us together was not the church, nor the library, nor the base-ball field--all donations in times past of the summer people to the natives, but it was the Neighborhood House, a donation from the country people and the summer people alike, not to any particular class but to all the dwellers in that mountain valley.