The saddle with its trappings probably weighed forty pounds, and Lynde
was glad before he had accomplished a third of the way to the village to
set down his burden and rest awhile. On each side of him now were
cornfields, and sloping orchards peopled with those grotesque, human-
like apple-trees which seem twisted and cramped by a pain possibly
caught from their own acidulous fruit. The cultivated land terminated
only where the village began. It was not so much a village as a garden--
a garden crowded with flowers of that bright metallic tint which
distinguishes the flora of northern climes. Through the centre of this
Eden ran the wide main street, fringed with poplars and elms and
chestnuts. No polluting brewery or smoky factory, with its hideous
architecture, marred the idyllic beauty of the miniature town--for
everything which is not a city is a town in New England. The population
obviously consisted of well-to-do persons, with outlying stock-farms or
cranberry meadows, and funds snugly invested in ships and railroads.

In out-of-the-way places like this is preserved the greater part of what
we have left of the hard shrewd sense and the simpler manner of those
homespun old worthies who planted the seed of the Republic. In our great
cities we are cosmopolitans; but here we are Americans of the primitive
type, or as nearly as may be. It was unimportant settlements like the
one we are describing that sent their quota of stout hearts and
flintlock muskets to the trenches on Bunker Hill. Here, too, the
valorous spirit which had been slumbering on its arm for half a century
started up at the first shot fired against Fort Sumter. Over the
chimney-place of more than one cottage in such secluded villages hangs
an infantry or a cavalry sword in its dinted sheath, looked at to-day by
wife or mother with the tenderly proud smile that has mercifully taken
the place of tears.