Had you looked on the hotel register you would have seen the name, Craig Mason, Boston, and above it that of Mrs. Henry Mason, his mother. Craig had never been very strong, and during his college course at Yale, had applied himself so closely to study that his health had suffered from it, and soon after he was graduated he had come to Ridgefield, hoping much from the pure air and quiet he would find there. Nor could he have found a more favorable spot for nerves unstrung and a tired brain. Just where Ridgefield is does not matter. There is such a place, and it lies on the Boston and Albany Railroad, which keeps it in touch with the world outside and saves it from stagnation. It is a typical New England town, full of rocks and hills and leafy woods, through which pleasant roads lead off and up to isolated farmhouses, some of them a hundred years old and more, and all with slanting roofs, big chimneys and low ceilings and little panes of glass. These are the houses from which the young generation, tired of the barren soil and hard labor which yields so little in return, emigrates to broader fields of action and a more stirring life, but to which the father and the mother, to whom every tree and shrub is dear, because identified with their early married life, cling with a tenacity which only death can sever. A river has its rise somewhere among the hills, and there are little ponds or lakes where in summer the white lilies grow in great profusion, and where in winter the girls and boys skate on moonlight nights, and men cut great blocks of ice for the Prospect House, which in July and August attracts many city people to its cool, roomy quarters. The house was built before the railroad was thought of, and in the days when stages plied between Boston and Albany and made it their stopping place for refreshments and change of horses. It was called a tavern when Zacheus Taylor brought his wife Dorothy there and became its owner. “Taylor’s Tavern” he christened it, and that name was on the creaking black sign in large white letters, and the little man always rubbed his hands together with pride when he looked at it and remembered that _he_ was the _Taylor_ whose name could be distinctly seen at a distance as you came up the street either from the east or the west. “A kind of beacon light,” he used to say, “tellin’ the played out traveler that there is rest for the weary at Taylor’s tavern.”