From a corn-growing country, we were evidently passing into a country
whose beautiful business was apples. Orchards began more or less to line
the road, and wagons with those same apple-barrels became a feature of
the highway.

Another of its features was the number of old ruined farmhouses we came
on, standing side by side with the new, more ambitious homesteads. We
seldom came on a prosperous-looking house but a few yards away was to be
seen its aged and abandoned parent, smothered up with bushes, roof fallen
in, timbers ready to collapse, the deserted hearth choked with débris and
overgrown with weeds--the very picture of a haunted house. Here had been
the original home, always small, seldom more than four rooms, and when
things had begun to prosper, a more spacious, and often, to our eyes, a
less attractive, structure had been built, and the old home left to the
bats and owls, with a complete abandonment that seemed to us--sentimental
travellers as we were--as cynical as it was curiously wasteful.

Putting sentiment out of the question, we had to leave unexplained why
the American farmer should thus allow so much good building material to
go to waste. Besides, as we also noted much farm machinery rusting
unhoused in the grass, we wondered why he did not make use of these old
buildings for storage purposes. But the American farmer has puzzled wiser
heads than ours, so we gave it up and turned our attention once more to
our own fanciful business, one highly useful branch of which was the
observation of the names on the tin letter-boxes thrusting themselves out
at intervals along the road.

The history of American settlement could, I suppose, be read in those
wayside letter-boxes, in such names, for instance, as "Theo. Leveque" and
"Paul Fugle," which, like wind-blown exotics from other lands, we found