The Masons, whose history I used to hear, were among the founders of New Providence, the vanished village of the autumnal Berkshire Hills. I well recall the stories of Elder Leland that I used to hear in my old Swansea home, and especially the awful ghost-story that the courtly evangelist used to relate confidentially to a few friends. No Rhode Island farmer’s boy of thirty years ago will ever forget that, and any allusion to it would make, in those days, young feet nimble in dark chambers and on lonesome roads. Times have, indeed, changed. No ghost-story, however vivid, would be likely to make a Rhode Island boy nervous to-day. I recall also the more cheerful story of the great Cheshire Cheese, as we used to hear it, and have often repeated, in my young churning days, the New Providence receipt for turning cream into butter under the miracle-working influence of the old-time dasher:— “Come, butter, come; Peter stands at the gate, Waiting for the butter-cake, Come, butter, come.” The rhyme of this persuasive ditty is not perfect, and I am unable to say who “Peter” was, though the name sounds Apostolic; but the Cheshire and Rhode Island farmers’ wives could all declare that this brief invocation gave a wonderful efficacy to the churn-dasher. I shall never forget my first excursion into Cheshire to visit the once famous farms of New Providence, and the graves of Elder Leland and the heroes of Bennington. It was a glimmering September day, such as brings the tourist of New York to Lenox, not far away. The sky was an over-sea of gold. The Housatonic lay, here like a mirror of glass in the brown woodland pastures, there purling amid purple gentians over mossy dams. The wrecks of old orchard trees dotted the landscape; fading beech-trees, with their bark perforated by the long bills of the golden-winged woodpeckers; aftermath in alluvial meadows; cornfields with orange banners on the uplands, and, over all, Greylock, green-wooded and maple-tinted, looking down the valley. Graveyards—like little villages of the dead—with mossy stones, touched the heart and fancies, and the town at last came full in view, with its white spire and faded inn. “Where is New Providence?” I asked of an old man who had stopped to rest on the cool russet sward under a leafy maple, where the locusts were singing in the bright air. “There is no New Providence any more,” said he. “It is all gone: the hotels, the stores, the churches, all—there is not a house left. There is where it _was_.” He pointed toward a sunny slope. How beautiful was the situation! But there was not so much as a house or an orchard. Shades of Oliver Goldsmith! Could it be possible that here in New England was a veritable Deserted Village?