THE EPIC OF NEW ENGLAND

A TERCENTENARY REVERIE

SOME day the history of New England will be written as an epic.

I hesitate to confess it, for I am New England born, but the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers and Plymouth Rock do not move me as once they did. Niagara stuns and terrifies one at first, but at length it lulls one to sleep. It is time perhaps to change the subject, and yet there is one thing about the episode that holds me against my will: there once lived men so fearfully in earnest that they could take their wives and children straight off the map into the blank vault of the west and without a thought of ever returning. They sought no port, no definite land: they sailed simply into the west and the first landfall they made was to be their home. They headed only for America three thoussand miles away.

And here I pause. When you aim at random at America you have a wide mark. After weeks and weeks of zigzagging and uncertainty, headed this way and that by contrary winds, swept leagues

to the south or the north by fierce tempests, blown out of all reckoning for days, at the mercy of a sailing-master eager only to land his cargo at the earliest possible moment, he cared not where, why of all points should New England have been the landfall? Why not Newfoundland? Why not Florida? Any one of a thousand chances would have veered them away from the New England coast. We say to-day that sheer chance flung them there. The Pilgrim said it was the hand of God on the tiller.

But whether it were chance or Providence, one thing is certain: that landfall decreed the settlement of a region as inhuman as any that ever engaged the powers of man. Had those Pilgrims possessed an accurate chart and had they known what we know in these later times, that landing never would have been. Indeed, had the seventeenth century known the real facts about the Atlantic coast and the territory inland, whole great areas of New England would have remained unsettled to this day. Where else in the world, save in Scotland, perhaps, or Switzerland, can one find under cultivation an area to match it? Mazes of boulders and glacial drift tilled with all seriousness as farms; dizzy hillsides jagged thick with rocks turned into cornfields; veritable sloughs bottomed with polypod and sweet-flag made into meadows; vast stretches of

granite ledges snarled with hardhack turned into pastures; wrenched from nature with incredible toil, fenced with heavy stone walls that called for the labor of Titans; winters Arctic cold with snow often for six months; roads eternally up and down at sharp angles, buried under great drifts in winter and washed into ragged trenches by the cloudbursts of summer-where else will one find a farming region like that?

The old Puritan hive, those earliest-settled towns near the mouths of the larger rivers and along the sea, sent out its first swarm during the mid-years of the eighteenth century. It was that sturdy brood that fought the Seven Years' War and the Revolution; a restless, free-born race, full-lunged and mighty-limbed, that crashed into the northern woods far up into Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, founded towns by every water-power, surveyed the land into lots, and carved out the first farms along the flats and river-courses. For forty years the wilderness rang with their axes, the crash of their old-growth pines, their mighty bonfires, and their shouts to their toiling oxen. Clearings became farms; trails were plowed into roads; wild mountain torrents were turned upon saws and millstones. That was the first generation of the New England hill lands; demigods who did each the work of five; who toiled every moment of the day

light and far beyond, a generation that wrestled barehanded with brute nature in her strongest fastnesses and won. And the women did no less than the men. They it was who under sternest conditions and amid elemental surroundings bore and reared those families of twelve and fifteen children, washed and baked and mended, prepared the great meals, spun the yarn, wove the cloth, made the garments, did the thousand little chores which a farm and a household demand, and died at last worn out, their work all undone lying in heaps about them.

The great families swiftly outgrew the home farm and scattered into the hills and the farther valleys to clear other land. This second generation completed the organization of the hill towns, pulled out the last stumps in the earlier meadows, built the great farmhouses with enormous chimneys and wainscoting of clear pine boards four feet in width, and completed the early highways, running them without thought of compromise straight over the steepest hills, oblivious of the fact, not discovered until a century later, that "the kettle bail is no longer when it lies down than when it stands erect." They multiplied the settled land by ten and they made of the northern hills a neighborhood with growing villages and fast improving farms.

The third generation, which came upon the scene in the early years of the new century, completed

the expansion. When they had done their work, every acre of land that could by human effort be wrung from nature had been taken. All the steep hillsides were dotted now with farmhouses. Everywhere were little neighborhoods: far in the mountain fastnesses, deep in the back valleys, high on the wild north slopes where the winter sun scarcely ever shone after mid-afternoon, or clustered like Swiss villages about the very bases of the bare peaks sometimes ten and fifteen miles from postoffice and store. It was this generation that completed the stone walls, running them for miles over hills and through forest, surrounding every field with a barricade like the outworks of a fortress, and heaping up rock heaps that to-day stand like the pyramids, imperishable monuments to a race forever gone.

Again great families of twelve and even eighteen children, that marvelous fourth generation about which our epic centers. Born in the thirties and forties, they saw New England in its prime. During their childhood the hills swarmed with life. Nowhere was place so remote that one might not find there a neighborhood with fifty and even seventy pupils in its red schoolhouse. Sprung from generations of hill-born men, toilers in the open air, feeders upon the wholesome fruits of the soil, lovers of the woods and the hills over which they scurried