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WAY up in the silence of the pines winds a road that the pioneers of two hundred years ago cut through the rock-strewn forests of the mountains. Crumbling lichen-covered walls that marked the pastures of long ago stretch away into those woods that claim the land again. Ancient trees of forgotten orchards drop their fruit from year to year, in the midst of a wilderness of birches, junipers, and tangled vines.

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Sometimes we chance upon foundation stones of a house that has long ago disappeared and nature has been busy there with her tapestries of moss, grass, and weeds.

But sometimes a weather-beaten cottage still stands in stubborn defiance of wind and rain. Quite deserted it invites you, with its halfopen, creaking door to break the pathos of its solitude, to call it a home once more, and live with the harmless ghosts of the buried past. Those dusty hearthstones, so cracked and uneven, once glowed with the embers that lighted each small room and cast dark shadows along the quaint summer trees that span the ceilings. In the kitchen fireplace still hangs the crane and you wonder who last hung the great iron pot upon it and stirred the fire beneath. The broad boards of the floor, grimy enough now, are warped and flaky

housewives of the seventeen hundreds. There is a quaint buffet built into one corner. A cracked coffee pot of blue ware and a moldy gourd dipper are all we find upon the shelves. Half the glass has disappeared from the windows in those old-fashioned sashes that have twelve divisions above and eight below. The roof of the ell has fallen in but you may squeeze through the half open, sagging door just in time to see a red squirrel scamper across the floor to his hiding place in the chimney. A great rosebush has struggled with the threshold of the porch door lifting it from the frame. Fragrant double blossoms are smiling in at the opening as if looking for the old friends who once smiled back at them.

From the worm-eaten steps what a view stretches away through a vista of trees! Far below is a little village clustered about its white church spire.

On a clear day like this you may see Hartford with its shining dome twenty-five miles away. Yonder to the north is Mount Tom, while between lie long sylvan stretches of uplands that the eye revels in, as all its own.

You might well fall in love with one of these abandoned houses. For years it has come within the indefinite boundaries of a mountain wood-lot whose farmer owner may send a few French choppers that way during the

may travel for half a day without meeting a passing wagon to disturb your meditations.

Here and there as you look up the roadside slopes you may locate imaginary summer homes, and wonder if lovers of the picturesque will ever own this land of quiet retreats.

New York is a little more than a hundred miles away and a drive of two hours would bring us to Springfield, Massachusetts.

The old inhabitants of this locality can never again people these solitudes. Here their ancestors built where the mountain air and resinous pines brought health and strength. Down in the valley live the people of to-day in comfortable farm houses much too large for the families that are rapidly dying out. Over there in little S the schoolhouse in the grove gathers but a score of children. Half a century ago nearly a hundred sat upon the long, black forms. Down on the Wilbraham road stands a house with large sunny rooms, good barns and thirty-five acres of land waiting for a purchaser with $800. Near by are others less pretentious at merely a nominal cost. One of the most healthful of climates, with almost uninterrupted sunshine through the winter, and with natural surroundings of unbroken beauty from May until November; what more could one ask for country life at the north?

The sportsman with rod and gun is here in his element. The quails run fearlessly by the roadside with their little brown broods. The botanist may secure hundreds of specimens in

a season.

The quaint dialect of New England is still on the lips of the inhabitants. In the village store the farmer with his weather-beaten face, shaggy fur cap, and suit of ancient date, has his

will look curiously at the feet of one who wears shoes and may exclaim: "Waal, I never had but one pair o' them in my life. They wus made by Uncle 'Rastus up there; he shoemaked fer a spell; made 'em outen old bootlegs; they wus humbly enough but we thought a darned sight o' them arfter all."

Most of these good old Connecticut Yankees pride themselves on keeping up with the times. They will talk with animation about that fell disease which they often call the "tucubelows" when they venture to pronounce the name.

If you are on the watch you will catch the rare old Saxon words which have generally disappeared even from English soil. The lizard that the small boy brings in from the brookside he calls an "Evet" and the uncut grass of the meadows is still known as "fog" though ten to one you had never heard the word thus used outside the poems of Burns and Ramsay.

Should you become intimate with one of these old inhabitants he may allow you to explore his garret where you will find tin-kitchens, tree-trunk barrels, old clocks, fire dogs, footstools, pillions, and spinning-wheels. If you would hear oldtime music the flail still keeps up its merry flip-flap in the broad barn. In the meadow the glinting scythe still swings and the oats are cradled as in the days of yore.

Shall I tell you how to find this quiet spot where old Time loves to linger and dawdle apparently forgetting that he ought to move along? The Highland Division of the New York and New Haven Railroad will take you to Shaker Station, whence North Somers is but four miles distant. You must find out the rest of