iced that all the "genuine Vermont maple-sugar" in
the Western market comes from the South, and is about as succulent
as the heel of a gum-boot. In all the State of Vermont there is but
one railroad, the Vermont Central; it begins at Grout's Corner,
Mass., and runs in a bee-line north until it reaches the southern
end of the Montreal bridge. This remarkable road has a so-called
branch operating once per week between White River Junction and
Montpelier, and a triweekly branch extending to Burlington.
Montpelier is the home of Hiram Atkins, the famous "Nestor uv
Checkerberry Journalism," and White River Junction is the whistling
station and water-tank from which our country gets its election
returns every four years. Burlington is located on Lake Champlain,
and contains the summer residence of that grand old survivor of the
glacial period, George F. Edmunds. Thus in a brief paragraph have we
compressed all that can be said of the commerce and the railways of
Vermont.

The other view is softened with the haze that hangs over the scenes of
childhood in the minds of all men of feeling when interpreted by an
artist in expressing the thought "that unbidden rises and passes in a
tear." It is from Field's little-known memorial to Mrs. Melvin L. Gray,
written while he was in Southern California:

The quiet beauty of these scenes recalls a time which, in my life,
is so long ago that I feel strangely reverential when I speak of it.
I find myself thinking of my boyhood, and of the hills and valleys
and trees and flowers and birds I knew when the morning of my life
was fresh and full of exuberance. Those years were spent among the
Pelham hills, very, very far from here; but memory o'erleaps the
mountain ranges, the leagues upon leagues of prairie, the mighty
rivers, the forest, the farming lands, o'erleaps them all; and
to-day, by that same sweet magic that instantaneously undoes the
years and space, I seem to be among the Pelham hills again. The
yonder glimpse of the Pacific becomes the silver thread of the
Connecticut, seen, not over miles of orange-groves, but over broad
acres of Indian corn; and instead of the pepper and eucalyptus, the
lemon and the palm, I see (or I seem to see) the maple once more,
and the elm and the chestnut trees, the shagbark walnut, the
hickory, and the birch. In those days, these rugged mountains of
this south land were unknown to me; and