wonderful panorama of beauty that spread before it, was the little
home justified for the dangers it had dared. Back of the house the
land climbed into a little ridge, with great, gray rocks here and
there, spots of cool, restful color amid the lavish green and gold and
purple of nature's carpeting. To the north swept hills clothed with
the deep, rich green of hemlock, the faint green flutter of birch, the
dense foliage of sugar maples. To the east, in the valley, a singing
silver brook flashed in and out among somber boulders, the land
ascending to sunny hilltop pastures beyond. But toward the south from
the homestead lay the gem of the scenery; one of the most beautiful
pictures the Berkshires know. Down the valley the hills divided,
sweeping upward east and west in magnificent curves; and through the
opening, range on range of distant mountains, including Mount Tom,
filled the view with an ever-changing fairyland of beauty--in the
spring a sea of tender, misty green; in the summer, a deep, heaving
ocean of billowy foliage; in the fall, a very carnival of color--gold,
rich reds, deep glowing browns and orange. And always, at morning,
noon and night, was seen subtle tenderness of violet shadows, of hazy
blue mists, of far-away purple distances.

Such was the site Martin Conwell chose for a home, a site that told
something of his own character; that had marked influence on the
family that grew up in the little farmhouse.

A mixture of the practical, hard common sense of New England and the
sympathetic, poetic temperament of the South was in this young New
England farmer--the genial, beauty-loving nature of his Southern
father, the rigid honesty, the strong convictions, the shrewd sense of
his Northern mother. Quiet and reserved in general, he was to those
who knew him well, kind-hearted, broad-minded, fun-loving. He not