ught of that deserted Southern garden as I followed my own New
England road. The flower-plots were in gay bloom all along the way;
almost every house had some flowers before it, sometimes carefully
fenced about by stakes and barrel staves from the miscreant hens and
chickens which lurked everywhere, and liked a good scratch and
fluffing in soft earth this year as well as any other. The world
seemed full of young life. There were calves tethered in pleasant
shady spots, and puppies and kittens adventuring from the door-ways.
The trees were full of birds: bobolinks, and cat-birds, and
yellow-hammers, and golden robins, and sometimes a thrush, for the
afternoon was wearing late. We passed the spring which famous spot in
the early settlement of the country, but many of its old traditions
are now forgotten. One of the omnipresent regicides of Charles the
First is believed to have hidden himself for a long time under a great
rock close by. The story runs that he made his miserable home in this
den for several years, but I believe that there is no record that more
than three of the regicides escaped to this country, and their
wanderings are otherwise accounted for. There is a firm belief that
one of them came to York, and was the ancestor of many persons now
living there, but I do not know whether he can have been the hero of
the Baker's Spring hermitage beside. We stopped to drink some of the
delicious water, which never fails to flow cold and clear under the
shade of a great oak, and were amused with the sight of a flock of gay
little country children who passed by in deep conversation. What could
such atoms of humanity be talking about? "Old times," said John, the
master of horse, with instant decision.

We met now and then a man or woman, who stopped to give us hospitable
greeting; but there was no staying for visits, lest the daylight might
fail us. It was delightful to find this old-established neighborhood
so thriving and populous, for a few days before I had driven over
three miles of road, and passed only one house that was tenanted, and
six cellars or crumbling chimneys where good farmhouses had been, the
lilacs blooming in solitude, and the fields, cleared with so much
difficulty a century or two ago, all going back to the original
woodland from which they were won. What would the old farmers say to
see the fate of their worthy bequest to the younger generation? They
would wag their heads sorrowfully, with sad foreb