escribe its beauty, which is of a character that refuses to submit to
description. You go down to the old town from the city, and you say to
yourself and your friends that you are enjoying the delights of the
country. You visit it from the plantations, and you feel that you are
breathing the kind of atmosphere that should be found in the social life
of a large, refined and perfectly homogeneous community. But whether you
go there from the city, or from the plantations, you are inevitably
impressed with a sense of the attractiveness of the place; you fall
under the spell of the old town--it was old even in the old times of the
sixties. And yet if you were called upon to define the nature of the
spell, what could you say? What name could you give to the tremulous
beauty that hovers about and around the place, when the fresh green
leaves of the great trees are fluttering in the cool wind, and
everything is touched and illumined by the tender colours of spring?
Under what heading in the catalogue of things would you place the vivid
richness which animates the town and the landscape all around when the
summer is at its height? And how could you describe the harmony that
time has brought about between the fine old houses and the setting in
which they are grouped?

All these things are elusive; they make themselves keenly felt, but they
do not lend themselves to analysis.

It is a pity that those who are interested in traditions that are truer
than history could not have all the facts in regard to Shady Dale from
the lips of Mr. Obadiah Tutwiler, who had constituted himself the oral
historian of the community. Mr. Tutwiler was alive as late as 1869, and
had at his fingers'-ends all the essential facts relating to the origin
and growth of the town, and he related the story with a fluency, an
accuracy, and a relish quite surprising in so old a man.

As was fitting, the old court-house, the temple of justice, had been
reared in the centre of the town, and the square that surrounds it took
the shape of a park of considerable dimensions. On two sides were some
of the more pretentious dwellings; the tavern, with a few of the more
modest houses took up a third side; while the fourth side was taken up
by the shops and stores; and so careful had the early settlers been with
the trees, that it was possible to stand in a certain upper window of
the court-house, and look out upon the town with not a house in sight.

Naturally, the most