it touches both.

We are so ancient that plenty of us remember the stone fireplace in the
log-cabin, with its dusters for the hearth of buffalo tail and
wild-turkey wing, with iron pot hung by a chain from the chimney hook,
with pewter or wooden plates from which to eat with horn-handled knives
and iron spoons. But yet are we so modern that we have fine new houses
with bay windows, ornamental cupolas, and porches raving woodenly in
that frettish fever which the infamous scroll-saw put upon fifty years
of our land's domestic architecture. And these houses are furnished with
splendid modern furniture, even with black walnut, gold touched and
upholstered in blue plush and maroon, fresh from the best factories. Our
fairly old people remember when they hunted deer and were hunted by the
red Indian on our town site, while their grandchildren have only the
memories of the town-born, of the cottage-organ, the novel railroad, and
the two-story brick block with ornamental false front. In short, we
round an epoch within ourselves, historically and socially.

The country, however, keeps its first purity of charm, a country of
little hills and little valleys lined with little quick rivers. These
beauties, indeed, have not gone unsung. Years ago a woman poet eased her
heart of ecstasies about this Little Country.

"Here swells the river in its boldest course," she wrote, "interspersed
by halcyon isles on which Nature has lavished all her prodigality in
tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble bluffs three hundred feet high,
their sharp ridges as exquisitely definite as the edge of a shell; their
summits adorned with those same beautiful trees and with buttresses of
rich rock, crested with old hemlocks that wear a touching and antique
grace amid the softer and more luxuriant vegetation."