ple; but it was an inheritance, not an
imitation. Save in the bustling business segment, abutting the four
corners, where the old United States road bore off westward to Bucephalo
and the lakes, the few score houses were set far back from the highway
in a wilderness of shrubbery, secluded by hedges and shaded by an almost
primeval growth of elms or maples. The whole hamlet might be mistaken
for a lordly park or an old-fashioned German Spa. Family marketing was
mostly done in Warchester; hence the village shops were like Arabian
bazaars, few but all-supplying. The most pregnant evidence of the
approach of modern ways that tinged the primitive color of the village
life, was the then new railway skirting furtively through the meadows on
the northern limits, as if decently ashamed of intruding upon such
idyllic tranquillity. The little Gothic station, cunningly hidden behind
a clustering grove of oaks at a respectful distance from the Corners,
like the lodge of a great estate, reconciled those who had at first
fought the iron mischief-maker.

The public edifices of the town--the Episcopal church, the free academy,
the bank, the young ladies' seminary--were very unlike such institutions
in the bustling, treeless towns of to-day. Corinthian columns and Greek
friezes adorned these architectural evidences of Acredale's affluence
and taste. The village had grown up on private grounds, conceded to the
public year by year as the children and dependents of the founders
increased. The Spragues were the founders, and they had never been
anxious to alienate their patrimony. Acredale is not now the sylvan
sanctuary of rural simplicity it was thirty years ago--before the war.
The febrile tentacles of Warchester had not yet reached out to make its
vernal recesses the court quarter for the "new rich." In Jack Sprague's
young warrior days the village was three miles from the most suburban
limits of the city. There was not even a horse-car, or, as fashionable
Warchesterians have it, a "tram," to remind the tranquil villagers that
life had any need more pressing than a jaunt to the post twice a day.
Some "city folks" did hold villas on the outskirts, but they used them
only for short seasons in the late summer, when the air at the lake
began to grow too sharp for outdoor pleasures.

Society in the place was patriarchal as an English shire town. The large
Sprague mansion, about which the village clustered at a respectful
distance, was the "C