extinction of front yards, and of the type of New England village
character and civilization with which they are associated. Formerly,
because I lived in an old-fashioned New England village, it would have
been hard for me to imagine that there were parts of the country where
the Front yard, as I knew it, was not in fashion, and that Grounds
(however small) had taken its place. No matter how large a piece of land
lay in front of a house in old times, it was still a front yard, in
spite of noble dimension and the skill of practiced gardeners.

There are still a good many examples of the old manner of out-of-door
life and customs, as well as a good deal of the old-fashioned provincial
society, left in the eastern parts of the New England States; but put
side by side with the society that is American rather than provincial,
one discovers it to be in a small minority. The representative United
States citizen will be, or already is, a Westerner, and his instincts
and ways of looking at things have certain characteristics of their own
which are steadily growing more noticeable.

For many years New England was simply a bit of Old England transplanted.
We all can remember elderly people whose ideas were wholly under the
influence of their English ancestry. It is hardly more than a hundred
years since we were English colonies, and not independent United States,
and the customs and ideas of the mother country were followed from force
of habit. Now one begins to see a difference; the old traditions have
had time to almost die out even in the most conservative and least
changed towns, and a new element has come in. The true characteristics
of American society, as I have said, are showing themselves more and
more distinctly to the westward of New England, and come back to it in a
tide that steadily sweeps away the old traditions. It rises over the
heads of the prim and stately idols before which our grandfathers and
grandmothers bowed down and worshiped, and which we ourselves were at
least taught to walk softly by as they toppled on their thrones.

One cannot help wondering what a lady of the old school will be like a
hundred years from now! But at any rate she will not be in heart and
thought and fashion of good breeding as truly an Englishwoman as if she
had never stepped out of Great Britain. If one of our own elderly ladies
were suddenly dropped into the midst of provincial English society, she
would be quite at home; but west