t,
crowned with thick woods. This whole country was my playground, a strip
some four or five miles long, and for the most of the way a mile wide
between the two rivers, with the rocky, wooded eminence for its northern
boundary.

In the days when the broad road that led from the great city was a
famous highway, it had run through a country of comfortable farm-houses
and substantial old-fashioned mansions standing in spacious grounds of
woodland and meadow. These latter occupied the heights along the great
river, like a lofty breastwork of aristocracy, guarding the humbler
tillers of the soil in the more sheltered plains and hollows behind
them. The extreme north of my playground had been, within my father's
easy remembering, a woodland wild enough to shelter deer; and even in my
boyhood there remained patches of forest where once in a while the
sharp-eyed picked up gun-flints and brass buttons that had been dropped
among those very trees by the marauding soldiery of King George III. of
tyrannical memory. There was no deer there when I was a boy. Deer go
naturally with a hardy peasantry, and not naturally, perhaps, but
artificially, with the rich and great. But deer cannot coexist with a
population composed of what we call "People of Moderate Means." It is
not in the eternal fitness of things that they should.

[Illustration]

For, as I first knew our neighborhood, it was a suburb as a physical
fact only. As a body politic, we were a part of the great city, and
those twain demons of encroachment, Taxes and Assessments, had
definitively won in their battle with both the farmers and the
country-house gentry. To the south, the farms had been wholly routed out
of existence. A few of the old family estates were kept up after a
fashion, but it was only as the officers of a defeated garrison are
allowed to take their own time about leaving their quarters. Along the
broad highway some of them lingered, keeping up a poor pretence of
disregarding new grades and levels, and of not seeing the little
shanties that squatted under their very windows, or the more offensive
habitations of a more pretentious poverty that began to range themselves
here and there in serried blocks.

[Illustration]

Poor people of moderate means! Nobody wants you, except the real estate
speculator, and he wants you only to empty your light pockets for you,
and to leave you to die of cheap plumbing in the poor little sham of a
house that he builds to su