Quaker Hill had
wallowed; and he desired with this object-lesson to convince the
town,--to win the support of at least his neighbors,--to the proposal
to transform the highways into good roads. But there was never a
response, and even his neighbors on the Hill, who cheerfully enjoy his
smooth stretch of stone road over the ancient wallow of their fathers,
manifested no active appreciation of his generosity. The generous
resident had purchased a stone-crusher and other necessaries for the
work; but they have been used only on private grounds.

The most conspicuous instance of following leadership in recent times
has been the measured devotion given by the community to the activities
which have centered in Akin Hall and in the institution known as Hill
Hope, on Site 35. The leaders in this activity have been themselves
under the influence of New York city ideas. Two of the three most
conspicuous persons are of this neighborhood, but have resided in New
York for years, returning to the Hill for the summers. The third is a
New Yorker by birth, and trained in Presbyterian religious experience
and especially in charitable activity.

Akin Hall has in the years 1892-1905 expressed the leadership in
religious confession and worship, after the forms of the Reformed
Christian order, and has embodied this leadership in the conventional
activities of a vigorous country parish.

For ten years Hill Hope, supported personally by the third member of
this group of leaders, was, until it was closed in 1904, a country home
for working girls. By a liberal policy it became also a center of much
interest and of a pervasive influence to the neighborhood. Meetings of a
social and devotional character were held there, to which the residents
were pleased to come, and in which the young women from the city met and
mingled with the Protestant residents of the Hill, especially with those
of the Quaker stock. The influence of Hill Hope was very marked, and its
power in representing to people of a narrow experience the ideals of a
richer and broader life was obvious to any one who saw the place it held
in the interests of the whole resident community.

These influences, thus compounded of the humanitarian, the
liberal-orthodox and the devotional, but in all things confessedly
religious, exerted themselves for the ten years named, unbroken. The
death of one member of this group of leaders, the head of one of the
three households peculiarly identifi