lking along our country road. At the
top of a steep little hill I paused to rest and let my eyes luxuriate in
the billowing greens and tender blues of the valley below. While I stood
there my neighbor came slowly up from the garden, her apron over her
head, a basket of green peas on her arm.

"What a view you have up here on your hill!" I said.

She drew back her apron and turned to look off. "Yes," she said
indulgently; "ye-e-s." Then her face brightened and she turned to me
with real animation: "But it's better in winter when the leaves is off,
'n' you c'n see the passin' on the lower road."

Fresh from the city as I was, with all its prejudices and intolerance
upon me, I was partly amused, partly irritated, by her answer. So all
this glory of greenness, all this wonder of the June woodland, was
merely tolerated, while the baffled observer waited for the leaves to be
"off"! And all for the sake of seeing--what? A few lumber wagons,
forsooth, loaded with ties for the railway, a few cows driven along
morning and evening, a few children trudging to and from school, the
postman's buggy on its daily rounds, twice a week the meat cart, once a
week the grocery wagon, once a month the "tea-man," and now and then a
neighbor's team on its way to the feed-store or the blacksmith's shop
down at "the Corners."

For this, then,--not for the beauty of the winter landscape, but for
this poor procession of wayfarers, my neighbors waited with impatience.
If I could, I would have snatched up their view bodily and carried it
off with me, back to my own farm for my own particular delectation. It
should never again have shoved itself in their way.

But since that time I have lived longer in the country. If I have not
made it my home for all twelve months, I have dwelt in it from early
April to mid-December, and now, when I think of my neighbor's remark, it
is with growing comprehension. I realize that I, in my patronizing
one-sidedness, was quite wrong.

City folk go to the country, as they say, to "get away"--justifiable
enough, perhaps, or perhaps not. They seek spots remote from the
centres; they choose deserted districts, untraveled roads; they
criticize their ancestors unmercifully for their custom of building
houses close to the road and keeping the front dooryard clear of
shrubbery. But they who built those homes which are our summer refuge
did not want to get away; they wanted to get together. The country was
not their respi