In the year 1870 my grandfather’s place was to all intents and purposes what it had been since the first portion of the old house was built during the reign of William and Mary. He was “The Squire” in his family and over the community, as his fathers had been before him for two centuries. If wills were to be drawn, land surveyed, property transferred, family quarrels adjusted, the duty fell upon him. From a material point of view the house and the farm and the way of life were as they had been. There was, I think, a mechanical corn-sheller, but I remember no other new-fangled mechanical device. The wheat for flour was grown on the place and ground at a near-by mill. Until but a few years before, the wool and flax for clothing and linen were also of home production, while the great loom was still in its place in the dim attic with its odour of thyme and beeswax. In addition to all the necessary fruits and vegetables, all the butter, cheese, bacon, hams came from the estate. So of course did the honey and the metheglyn, or honey-wine as you read of it in Chaucer, which, I verily believe, was made there last of all places in the world. To a great extent the life was still communal. For mowing, planting, harvesting, shearing, husking, the farmers came together to work in common, while the disability of one brought the others together to do his work. Communal also in a sense was the household. Many a time have I awakened as a boy, between lavender-scented homespun sheets, and beneath a wonderful woven coverlet, to dress in the early dawn and go down to the long kitchen with its eight-foot fireplace, to find all the feminine portion of the household preparing such a breakfast as the present day cannot afford; and later I have watched the neighbors gathered in the “east room” ingeniously “drawing in” rugs and mats of marvellous (if not strictly artistic) design and colour. As was the custom in that country, the house was double, the eldest son occupying the new wing until in time he removed to the old part and his son in turn took the new. It was a place of tradition, of immemorial custom, of self-respecting because arduous life, and every inch of ancient house, of vast and rambling barns, even of the fields and pastures, gardens and orchards and woodland, was redolent of old history, of permanence, of stability, of dignity and of a vivid liberty. Here was no telephone, no automobile, no elaborate collection of complicated and costly machines, no flood of cheap newspapers, magazines or other “literature,” no weekly expedition to the “movies,” no ready-made clothes that must be constantly replaced or that annually went out of fashion, no pianola or graphophone, no “art-furniture,” no candy and cheap drinks and fruit out-of-season. Neither was there any labour problem, or strikes or poverty or high-cost-of-living.