roads, the wandering quack—­Patent Electric Pills, nerve cures, etc.—­divides the field with the seed and fruit man and the seller of cattle-boluses.  They dose themselves a good deal, I fancy, for it is a poor family that does not know all about nervous prostration.  So the quack drives a pair of horses and a gaily-painted waggon with a hood, and sometimes takes his wife with him.  Once only have I met a pedlar afoot.  He was an old man, shaken with palsy, and he pushed a thing exactly like a pauper’s burial-cart, selling pins, tape, scents, and flavourings.  You helped yourself, for his hands had no direction, and he told a long tale in which the deeding away of a farm to one of his family was mixed up with pride at the distances he still could cover daily.  As much as six miles sometimes.  He was no Lear, as the gift of the farm might suggest, but sealed of the tribe of the Wandering Jew—­a tremulous old giddy-gaddy.  There are many such rovers, gelders of colts and the like, who work a long beat, south to Virginia almost, and north to the frontier, paying with talk and gossip for their entertainment.

Yet tramps are few, and that is well, for the American article answers almost exactly to the vagrant and criminal tribes of India, being a predatory ruffian who knows too much to work.  ’Bad place to beg in after dark—­on a farm—­very—­is Vermont.  Gypsies pitch their camp by the river in the spring, and cooper horses in the manner of their tribe.  They have the gypsy look and some of the old gypsy names, but say that they are largely mixed with Gentile blood.

Winter has chased all these really interesting people south, and in a few weeks, if we have anything of a snow, the back farms will be unvisited save by the doctor’s hooded sleigh.  It is no child’s play to hold a practice here through the winter months, when the drifts are really formed, and a pair can drop in up to their saddle-pads.  Four horses a day some of them use, and use up—­for they are good men.

Now in the big silence of the snow is born, perhaps, not a little of that New England conscience which her children write about.  There is much time to think, and thinking is a highly dangerous business.  Conscience, fear, undigested reading, and, it may be, not too well cooked food, have full swing.  A man, and more particularly a woman, can easily hear strange voices—­the Word of the Lord rolling between the dead hills; may see visions and dream dreams; get revelations and an outpouring of the spirit, and end (such things have been) lamentably enough in those big houses by the Connecticut River which have been tenderly christened The Retreat.  Hate breeds as well as religion—­the deep, instriking hate between neighbours, that is born of a hundred little things added up, brooded over, and hatched by the stove when two or three talk together in the long evenings.  It would be very interesting to get the statistics of revivals and murders, and find how