A FOUR hours’ journey by train, each minute going farther and farther away from thickly settled country, and then I found myself waiting on a depot platform for the stage-driver who was to conduct me to Upper and Lower Village, twelve miles from the railroad.
I looked around and when my eyes lighted on a wooden-legged man, seated on the front seat of a democrat wagon, I knew that I had found the conveyance. I went over to him and said,
“Are you going to Upper and Lower Village?”
He aimed some colored expectoration over his horse’s ear, watched it alight upon a fluttering piece of paper, and then, satisfied with his marksmanship, he said, gruffly,
“Ef you’re th’ Elder, why, I got a seat. Jump in!”
The day was excessively hot, and we sat under the full glare of the sun. We left the little railroad village and plunged on through the churned-up swirls of choking dust straight into the isolation of this world, into a part of New England where whole townships have not even yet attained unto the dignity of names, but like prisoners with their suffrage taken from them, must be known by mere numbers.
The forests had been leveled, and there were innumerable acres of deforested land covered with rusty branches which had been left after the choppers had trimmed the logs. After several miles, we came to wide stretches of plain, covered with blueberry bushes.
A dip in the road, and we had plowed through the last inch of dust: the wheels of the democrat rattled merrily over the stone road of Lower Village. Word had been telephoned from the first farm we had passed that “the new Elder was on the stage with Bill.” The women boldly stood at their doors watching; from behind many windows I saw intent faces engaged in taking a comprehensive glance at me. I maintained a stolid attitude, and pretended not to be aware of the intense and continuous surveillance to which I was subjected. We thundered over a wooden bridge, went up a steep hill, and drew rein at a long veranda, which “Bill” informed me was the “Office, whar you git down.”
A tall, timid octogenarian, in shirtsleeves, whose thick trousers were drawn up tightly above soil-daubed shoes, introduced himself as “the deacon” and conducted me to a little house down a lane which ended in a pasture. The hot air of the day was fragrant with the odor of sweet-smelling foliage. Crows were screaming in the distance over the tops of some burnt pines. A woman, tall and thin and pale, welcomed me with all the hospitality with which a mother would welcome a son. I knew from that moment that I had a pleasant summer before me.
The two villages were nothing more than single rows of houses on either side of a main road. That road went inland for miles and miles through immeasurable solitudes, where no man dwelt. We were at the end of the world, apparently.