ion they found that they had sold out, and that their old-time
paradise was as surely lost to them as was Eden to Adam and Eve.

To-day Acre Hill is gridironed with macadamized streets that are lined
with houses of an architecture of various degrees of badness. Where
birds once sang, and squirrels gambolled, and stray foxes lurked, the
morning hours are made musical by the voices of milkmen, and the
squirrels have given place to children and nurse-maids. Where sturdy
oaks stood like sentinels guarding the forest folk from intrusion from
the outside world now stand tall wooden poles with glaring white
electric lights streaming from their tops. And the soughing of the winds
in the trees has given place to the clang of the bounding trolley. All
this is the work of the Acre Hill Land Improvement Company.

Yet if, as I have said, the Acre Hill Land Improvement Company sprang up
in a night, it passed many sleepless nights before it received the
rewards which come to him who destroys Nature. And when I speak of a
corporation passing sleepless nights I do so advisedly, for at the
beginning of its career the Acre Hill Land Improvement Company consisted
of one man--a mild-mannered man who had previously labored in similar
enterprises, and whose name was called blessed in a thousand
uncomfortable houses in uncomfortable suburbs elsewhere, that, like Acre
Hill, had once been garden spots, but had been "improved." Even a
professional improver of land finds sleep difficult to woo at the
beginning of such an enterprise. In the first instance, when one buys
land, giving a mortgage in full payment therefor, with the land as
security, one appears to have assumed a moderately heavy burden. Then,
when to this one adds the enormous expense of cutting streets through
the most beautiful of the sylvan glades, the building of sewers, and the
erection of sample houses, to say nothing of the strain upon the
intellect in the selection of names for the streets and lanes and
circles that spring into being, one cannot but wonder how the master
mind behind it all manages to survive.

But the Acre Hill Land Improvement Company did survive, and Dumfries
Corners watched its progress with much interest. Regrets were expressed
when some historic knoll was levelled in order to provide a nice flat
space for a public square. Youngsters who had bagged many a partridge on
Acre Hill felt like weeping when one stretch of bush after another was
cut ruthlessly aw