"I didn't mind it-I et it alive! ward, after I got married, it got me. children was comin' on.

'Twas only afterSpecially when the

Work from dark to dark in the

quarries no derricks in them days, either, all liftin' and rollin' by hand-and doin' the housework at homeEthel was awful ailin', near died many a time durin' them days, for all she's so hearty now-walkin' for the doctor to the village—weren't no telephones round here then— and havin' no heart for walkin' like I'd used to have. A man can do anything long's he's got a heart for it. Goin' it like that for near eight years-the children was always ailin', too, well as Ethel, we lost three on 'em, not countin' Clarence, still-born-well, it broke me down, I got a cold settled on my lungs, and the doctor, he said my heart was bad, too, said I couldn't never do no more hard work, but I kep' it up till I near died, and I ain't been good for nawthin' since.

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Seein' you come up the road," apologized Henry, got me started on all this. In them days, before I got married, seems like the artusses used to walk the roads more'n they do now, anyway the women did. I remember sittin' of a Sunday mornin' on the old porch back there and watchin' 'em go by. Them was the days when I was fresh as a cucumber picked in the mornin'.” They came to the far corner of the orchard and stopped to look at the view.

CHAPTER III

SOME MOUNTAINS, A VALLEY, A VILLAGE, A VIEW, AND A VERY FLAT ANNOUNCEMENT

WHOEVER has taken a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of day produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains; and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but, sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors around their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.

(These rich words are none of mine, but Washington Irving's, scriptor Americanus, abnormis sapiens; they are put in here because they are so good, because they are so pat, and because, forming as they do a part of one of the greatest American classics, they are not likely to lack novelty. They flow on:)

At the foot of these fairy mountains the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village,

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whose shingle roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village of great antiquity, having been founded by the Dutch colonists, in the early days of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant, (may he rest in peace!)

And here we must let Irving, also, rest in peace: even though we may pray that, from time to time, somewhat of his spirit may be manifest among us; for the Dutch houses he proceeds to mention have long since gone down into the dust and ashes of a larger antiquity. Nor does he refer to the Skuyterkill, surely an important feature of the village of Woodbridge, whose present aspects he has thus far located and described.

Perhaps the Skuyterkill is not so important in itself, even though it is a prettier little stream than its significance of "Squatters' Creek" might indicate, as in its effects. In an antiquity sufficient to modernize even Irving's Dutch houses, it had much to do with modeling the fine valley, most spacious of Catskill valleys, that now bears its name. Between The Slide and Teyce Ten Eyck Mountain, which terminate the ridges on either side of its eastward debouchment toward the Hudson, there is a twoby-ten-mile sweep of rolling, variegated country, not so bad as much of our eastern lands for farming, and superlative in its response to the changing lights of morning and evening, to the changing vestures of spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

It is not a valley to tempt eagle-spirits; there is little of the obtrusively grand and awesome about it; but for

friendliness, expansiveness, quiet beauty and a certain rough eccentricity approaching downright humor, it has received the homage of a few choice souls. Nor does its lack of obtrusive grandeur and awesomeness indicate any pettiness in its make-up: rather, as among human characteristics of any real depths, the reverse. Especially when evening slants across the summits and the long skyroofed corridors to westward, it seems to include all the space in the world, and in the unplumbed universe beyond. Its mountains neither make sterile the earth, nor shut out the sky.

Woodbridge on the Skuyterkill, Slide Mountain and Teyce Ten Eyck-the names in juxtaposition suggest the basic Dutch-English stock of the inhabitants. But if the stock is basically Dutch-English, time and chance have made the present branches more heterogeneous of nationality and social strata than is the case with most other similar communities of our heterogeneous America. No more than America itself has it proved a melting pot; it has received strains and meanings from the ends of the earth, and of time, not to fuse them into a hard uniformity, but to develop the most viable of their differences, keeping them distinct, fluid, chemically combinable, capable of life-giving reactions and surprises, an earnest of the absurdity of some erudite fears for the world-state that is to be.

Some three decades since, a certain rich man founded a Ruskinesque art and handicrafts colony on the northward side of the valley, westward of the summit of Teyce Ten Eyck some two miles, and some three miles from the old village. A few years later came the summer school of a New York academy of painting. From these be

ginnings, the community has added to its year-round population numerous unattached artists, writers, retired business men, peripatetic philosophers, and general intellectual vagrants, thrown off from the maelstrom of New York City, for the most part, and more congenial to the easy-going ways of Woodbridge than to the somewhat constricting activities of our new Hub of the Universe. Without minimizing the importance of hubs, Woodbridge enjoyed its peripheral position as offering it freedom from much purely mechanical wear and tear, as well as affording a larger view of the universe. If New York moved the universe, it had its reward; and Woodbridge felt anything but compunction for sitting, in the nature of a philosophical fly, on a spoke of its wheel.

It was both fortunate in its position, and jealous of its fortune; since the village lay some four miles from the nearest railway station, and a slightly greater distance from the nearest Hudson River landing, it had escaped that devastating summer invasion whose signs are merrygo-rounds, dance-halls, booze-pagodas and synagogues in the remoter Catskill cities, and even its half-dozen farmer-boarding-house-keepers were a unit with the rest of the community in desiring to make its escape permanent. Throughout its various social strata it had a sort of snobbery, neither financial nor social, but intellectual and democratic, that had proved a barrier rather than an attraction to undesirables.

For ten miles along either side of the Skuyterkill Valley, and over the ridges between, the substantial white farmhouses of the older generation were neighborly with the fanciful dwellings of newer arrivals, from sumptuous country mansion to bark hut, with wide-roofed brown