haw!’ even as is written in American stories.  And the speech of the driver explains many things in regard to the dialect story, which at its best is an infliction to many.  Now that I have heard the long, unhurried drawl of Vermont, my wonder is, not that the New England tales should be printed in what, for the sake of argument, we will call English and its type, but rather that they should not have appeared in Swedish or Russian.  Our alphabet is too limited.  This part of the country belongs by laws unknown to the United States, but which obtain all the world over, to the New England story and the ladies who write it.  You feel this in the air as soon as you see the white-painted wooden houses left out in the snow, the austere schoolhouse, and the people—­the men of the farms, the women who work as hard as they with, it may be, less enjoyment of life—­the other houses, well painted and quaintly roofed, that belong to Judge This, Lawyer That, and Banker Such an one; all powers in the metropolis of six thousand folk over by the railway station.  More acutely still, do you realise the atmosphere when you read in the local paper announcements of ‘chicken suppers’ and ’church sociables’ to be given by such and such a denomination, sandwiched between paragraphs of genial and friendly interest, showing that the countryside live (and without slaying each other) on terms of terrifying intimacy.

The folk of the old rock, the dwellers in the older houses, born and raised hereabouts, would not live out of the town for any consideration, and there are insane people from the South—­men and women from Boston and the like—­who actually build houses out in the open country, two, and even three miles from Main Street which is nearly 400 yards long, and the centre of life and population.  With the strangers, more particularly if they do not buy their groceries ‘in the street,’ which means, and is, the town, the town has little to do; but it knows everything, and much more also, that goes on among them.  Their dresses, their cattle, their views, the manners of their children, their manner towards their servants, and every other conceivable thing, is reported, digested, discussed, and rediscussed up and down Main Street.  Now, the wisdom of Vermont, not being at all times equal to grasping all the problems of everybody else’s life with delicacy, sometimes makes pathetic mistakes, and the town is set by the ears.  You will see, therefore, that towns of a certain size do not differ materially all the world over.  The talk of the men of the farms is of their farms—­purchase, mortgage, and sale, recorded rights, boundary lines, and road tax.  It was in the middle of New Zealand, on the edge of the Wild horse plains, that I heard this talk last, when a man and his wife, twenty miles from the nearest neighbour, sat up half the night discussing just the same things that the men talked of in Main Street, Vermont, U.S.A.