Evered

EVERED
BY BEN AMES WILLIAMS NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue Copyright, 1921, By E. P. Dutton & Company All Rights Reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA EVERED
THERE is romance in the very look of the land of which I write. Beauty beyond belief, of a sort to make your breath come more quickly; and drama—comedy or tragedy according to the eye and the mood of the seer. Loneliness and comradeship, peace and conflict, friendship and enmity, gayety and somberness, laughter and tears. The bold hills, little cousins to the mountains, crowd close round each village; the clear brooks thread wood and meadow; the birches and scrub hardwood are taking back the abandoned farms. When the sun drops low in the west there is a strange and moving purple tinge upon the slopes; and the shadows are as blue as blue can be. When the sun is high there is a greenery about this northern land which is almost tropical in its richness and variety.
The little villages lie for the most part in sheltered valley spots. Not all of them. Liberty, for example, climbs up along a steep hill road on your way to St. George’s Pond, or over the Sheepscot Ridge, for trout. No spot lovelier anywhere. But you will come upon other little house clusters, a white church steeple topping every one, at unsuspected crossroads, with some meadowland round and about, and a brook running through the village itself, and perhaps a mill sprawled busily across the brook. It is natural that the villages should thus seek shelter; for when the winter snows come down this is a harsh land, and bitter cold. So is it all the more strange that the outlying farms are so often set high upon the hills, bare to the bleak gales. And the roads, too, like to seek and keep the heights. From Fraternity itself, for example, there is a ten-mile ridge southwest to Union, and a road along the whole length of the ridge’s crest, from which you may look for miles on either side.
This is not a land of bold emprises; neither is it one of those localities which are said to be happy because they have no history. There is history in the very names of the villages hereabouts. Liberty, and Union, and Freedom; Equality, and Fraternity. And men will tell you how their fathers’ fathers came here in the train of General Knox, when that warrior, for Revolutionary services rendered, was given title to all the countryside; and how he sub-granted to his followers; and how they cleared farms, and tilled the soil, and lumbered out the forests, and exterminated deer and moose and bear. Seventy years ago, they will tell you, there was no big game hereabouts; but since then many farms, deserted, have been overrun by the forests; and the bear are coming back, and there are deer tracks along every stream, and moose in the swamps, and wildcats scream in the night. Twenty or thirty or forty miles to the north the big woods of Maine begin; so that this land is an outpost of the wilderness, thrust southward among the closer dwellings of man.