were no telephones, no newspapers even. Fortunate indeed was the man
whose farm abutted on a bend, for there he could set his house, close
to the road, viewing the approaches in either direction, and no
traveler could get by him, or at any rate by his wife, without
yielding the latest gossip from the town above or below, perhaps from
the greater world beyond. The highroad was then the sole artery of
commerce, of communication, of intercourse of man with man.

How neighborly was the house on the bend, shedding its parlor-candle
rays like a beacon by night down the mile of straightaway, or flapping
its chintz curtains in the June sunshine! What a testimony it is, in
its present gray ruin, to the human hunger for news and gossip and
friendliness!

The old order has changed, indeed. We no longer build on the bend. We
don't have bends if we can help it. They are dangerous and hard to
maintain. A house on one would be uninhabitable with the dust. We do
not seek the neighborliness of the road, but retire as far as we can
to the back of our lot, with our telephone and newspaper. The old
house on the bend now stands deserted. From country estates dimly seen
in their remote privacy of trees and gardens, the stone highway leads
to other estates equally remote and scornful of publicity. Between
them the motors rush. The old house is dusty and falling into ruin,
and every passing car kicks up some bit of crushed stone into its
tangled dooryard. It looks pathetically down the road with unseeing
eyes, the last relic of a vanishing order.

[Illustration]

_Concerning Hat-trees_

It is well sometimes, when we are puffed up with our achievements as a
race,--our conquest of the elements, our building of mighty bridges
and lofty sky-scrapers, our invention of wireless telegraphy and
horseless carriages and aeroplanes and machine guns and secret
diplomacy and wage slavery and war,--it is well to indulge in the
chastening reflection that there are still some things we cannot
achieve. We may reflect that the appleless Eden has not yet been
discovered, or that the actor without vanity is yet unborn, or the
"treasonless" Senate yet unassembled. My own method is to reflect that
the ideal hat-tree has never been constructed.

At present I have no hat-tree, because I live in an old farm house
where there is a square piano and a hall closet, and we don't need
one. In New York I neve