[Illustration:  THE SILENT WITNESS.]

THE SILENT WITNESS

BY HERBERT D. WARD

There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more from the railroad station.  To the chance summer visitor the seclusion and the rest seem entrancing.  The glamour of mountain scenery and trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure.  He carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and asks the name of a distant peak.  If he should notice, how would he know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the empty stall?  Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners of the stone farm.  His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of anxiety.

There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to be straightened by men of a mountain birth.  The question whether the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one.  So the grand old stock is run out of the soil?  And is it replaced by the sons and grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?

Michael Angelo said that “men are worth more than money,” and if what was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship, Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount Kearsarge.  For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of boulders in the mountains.

It was situated upon the cold shoulder of a hill, sixteen miles from the nearest station.  The three-mile trail which led from the village would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy road.  What a site for a hotel!  Yet the hotel did not materialize, and the “view” neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors of the desolate spot.

“Never mind, I reckon we’ll pull through,” Isaac used to comfort his mother.

“You’re a good boy, Ikey.  If the Lord is willin’, I guess I am,” she answered with quaint devoutness.