AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN

“In connection with this phase of the problem of transportation it must be remembered that the rush of population to the great cities was no temporary movement.  It is caused by a final revolt against that malignant relic of the dark ages, the country village and by a healthy craving for the deep, full life of the metropolis, for contact with the vitalizing stream of humanity.”—­Pritchell’s “Handbook of Economics,” page 247.

Sometimes people from Hillsboro leave our forgotten valley, high among the Green Mountains, and “go down to the city,” as the phrase runs, They always come back exclaiming that they should think New Yorkers would just die of lonesomeness, and crying out in an ecstasy of relief that it does seem so good to get back where there are some folks.  After the desolate isolation of city streets, empty of humanity, filled only with hurrying ghosts, the vestibule of our church after morning service fills one with an exalted realization of the great numbers of the human race.  It is like coming into a warmed and lighted room, full of friendly faces, after wandering long by night in a forest peopled only with flitting shadows.  In the phantasmagoric pantomime of the city, we forget that there are so many real people in all the world, so diverse, so unfathomably human as those who meet us in the little post-office on the night of our return to Hillsboro.

Like any other of those gifts of life which gratify insatiable cravings of humanity, living in a country village conveys a satisfaction which is incommunicable.  A great many authors have written about it, just as a great many authors have written about the satisfaction of being in love, but in the one, as in the other case, the essence of the thing escapes.  People rejoice in sweethearts because all humanity craves love, and they thrive in country villages because they crave human life.  Now the living spirit of neither of these things can be caught in a net of words.  All the foolish, fond doings of lovers may be set down on paper by whatever eavesdropper cares to take the trouble, but no one can realize from that record anything of the glory in the hearts of the unconscious two.  All the queer grammar and insignificant surface eccentricities of village character may be ruthlessly reproduced in every variety of dialect, but no one can guess from that record the abounding flood of richly human life which pours along the village street.

This tormenting inequality between the thing felt and the impression conveyed had vexed us unceasingly until one day Simple Martin, the town fool, who always says our wise things, said one of his wisest.  He was lounging by the watering-trough one sunny day in June, when a carriage-load of “summer folk” from Windfield over the mountain stopped to water their horses.  They asked him, as they always, always ask all of us, “For mercy’s sake, what do you people do all the time, away off here, so far from everything.”