“I can advertise now with a good stomach,” she said, and every spring there appeared in the Boston papers and Worcester _Spy_ and Springfield _Republican_, a notice setting forth the good qualities of the Prospect House and laying great stress upon its rooms and views. If the advertisement was to be believed, every woman could have a large corner room, with the finest view in all New England. To some extent this was true; not all could have corner rooms, but all could have splendid views. If you faced the north you looked out upon what farmers call a mowing lot, where early in the summer the grass grew fresh and green, with here and there a sprinkling of cowslips, and later on lay on the ground in great swaths of newly mown hay, filling the air with a delicious perfume. Beyond were sunny pasture lands and wooded hills, and in the distance the church spires of North Ridgefield, with the smoke of its manufactories rising above the tree tops. If your room faced the east you looked up a long broad street, lined on either side with old-time houses, whose brass knockers and Corinthian pillars told of a past aristocracy before the steam engine thundered through the town and the whistle of a big shoe shop on a side street woke its employees at six o’clock and called them to work at seven. Here, nearly touching each other across the street, are gigantic elms, which tradition says were planted on the day when news of the Declaration of Independence reached the patriotic town of Ridgefield. Liberty elms they are called, and they stretch along for nearly a mile from east to west, and, making a detour, spread their long branches protectingly across the Mall which leads into the Common. To the south is the railroad and the Chicopee winding its way through green meadows to a larger river which will take it to the Sound and thence to the sea whose waters bathe another continent. If your room was at the west you looked at your right on grassy hills, dotted with low roofed houses and on pastures where spoonwood and huckleberries grow. At your left the headstones of the cemetery gleam white among the evergreens and tell where Ridgefield’s dead are sleeping, the tall monuments keeping guard over the gentry of brass knocker and Corinthian pillar memory, and the less pretentious stones marking the last resting place of the middle class, the bourgeois,—for Ridgefield draws the line pretty close, and blue blood counts for more than money. Near the willows and close to a wall so wide that the children walk upon it as they go to and from school are the old graves, whose dark, century stained stones have 17— upon them and are often visited by lovers of antiquity. Some of those who sleep there must have heard the guns of the Revolution and helped to plant the Liberty Elms which keep guard over them like watchful sentinels. The Ridgefield people are very proud of their old graves and their cemetery generally,