golden age forever gone. For North and South alike the war ended an era, and behind it lies the only romance this garish republican land of ours has ever known.

In New England it vanished almost literally in a night. It was like the bursting of a barrier behind which the waters have been silently gathering. Now vast stretches of the land are again wildernesses; everywhere silence save as the hawk screams over it and the fox arouses the night echoes. Whole neighborhoods have been abandoned; school districts where sixty and seventy scholars plowed through the winter snow deserted completely. Again as in the days of the earlier generations are the farms confined to the river bottoms and the easier worked plains. Those hillside fields over which the fathers toiled so terribly are distant pastures now, wild and seldom visited, or else they are veritable forests, and the deer, an animal unknown to the third and fourth generations, swarm again as in the days of the first settlers. Slowly but surely the wilderness again is claiming its own. As the hunter crashes though the thick woods he comes constantly upon the great stone walls and the rock heaps of that race which has vanished almost as completely as the mound-builders. Sometimes he finds the cellar hole and the old well, and near by perhaps a few ghastly skeletons of apple-trees, but

there is nothing else to tell him that here only a lifetime ago was a home that had rung with the happy voices of children.

That exodus never has been recorded. There is in it the material for a thousand tragedies. What heartburnings in the old homes from which the children had all departed! Here the father and mother abandoned the farm and went, too; here the mother died first and the father lived alone for a time in the home that once had been so full of joyous life; and here perhaps it was that the father died first. Almost every one of these little abandoned farms has a tragedy written over its latter days. No one can tell the longings, the heartburnings, the loneliness of two parents growing old, their children all in distant lands, their farm which had always been their home no longer a thing of value. A few years they struggle along in the old round, but the end is inevitable. The farmhouse door closes forever when it shuts behind the little funeral procession. The son who has come for a few sad days from the West would gladly sell the old place, but there is no one to buy. For a time the hay is sold to those who will buy it, but the gray birches grow swiftly over the walls, the grass is no longer worth the cutting, and the farm becomes a pasture. The old buildings, their roofs tumbled in, furnish shelter for a while to the sheep and the

young cattle until a spring fire clears the place of the rubbish. The forest returns with swiftness, and it blots out at last the final vestige of the labors of man.

To-day this Northland is the country that God forsook. A curse seems to have fallen upon it. A blight has fallen upon its fruit-trees; the browntail and the gipsy moths have blasted it; the gray birch is in the old pastures; the lumber-man and the forest-fire have swept off its pines and spruce and pointed firs. The churches are all but abandoned. What few farms there are are taken more and more by French Canadians and other aliens who know no more of the history of the land than did the old Teutons who settled amid the Celtic monuments. To them the great stone cairns, relics of the first clearing, and the double stone walls runing for miles over the hilltops and through tangled forests, and the abandoned cellar holes and wells in distant pastures are as unintelligible as are the relics of the mound-builders to the farmers of the Middle West.

The cultivated lands are every year decreasing. In the State of New Hampshire, according to Sanborn, its historian, "More than a million acres cultivated in 1850 had gone back to pasturage and woodland in 1900." The native race is swiftly dying out. In 1900 almost half of the population

of Massachusetts were born of foreign parentage. The hill towns are losing in population steadily. Let me take as a type my boyhood town in Grafton County. In 1860 its population was 1273; in 1870, 876; in 1880, 728; in 1890, 679; in 1900, 630; in 1910, 559; in 1920, 480. In 1861 in a single day. a hundred young men enlisted from this town for the war, and the greater number of them never returned as permanent dwellers. Whole neighborhoods in the seventies migrated to Minnesota and to Iowa. In 1860 there was scarcely a foreignborn person within the limits of the township; today of the small remnant that remains nearly 25 per cent. are of alien birth. It is so in the whole State. Again to quote Sanborn: "In one generation the foreign-born in New Hampshire have trebled and those of foreign parentage considerably more than doubled."

The epic of New England centers about four generations, and the greatest of them was the last, that marvelous single generation that burst from its borders like another wave of vikings from the north and tamed a raw continent. It is a new epic of a new Jason who burst into the unknown West and wrung from it the marvelous golden fleece which we pigmies of the later years must look at forever in wonder.

ON THE TERMINAL MORAINE OF NEW ENGLAND PURITANISM 1

I

ONE may not dwell long with the biography or the writings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman without being reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne. There is suggestive parallelism at the start. Both traced

their lines of descent to old Salem, Massachusetts, and to families which had persisted there since colonial days. In the line of the one was William Hawthorne, a grim magistrate who ordered the lashing of Quakers and itinerant preachers and vagabonds; and in the line of the other was Bray Wilkins, a judge in the witchcraft trials of a later day. That the two grimmest recorders of Puritan tragedy and its inherited results should have originated in this town of dark tradition is, we somehow like to feel, not a coincidence. It sets us to looking for other parallelisms; it furnishes us with a key.

A descendant of Bray Wilkins, Warren E. Wilkins, born in the generation which began in the

1 By permission of Harper & Brothers, publishers of "A New England Nun," Modern Classics edition.