(TO BE COMPLETED IN FOUR LONG INSTALMENTS)
CHAPTER I
RED HILL drowses through the fleeting hours as though not only time, but mills, machinery, and railways were made for slaves. Hemmed in by the breathing silences of scattered woods, open fields, and the far reaches of misty space, it seems to forget that the traveler, studying New England at the opening of the nineteenth century through the windows of a hurrying train, might sigh for a vanished ideal, and concede the general triumph of a commercial age.
For such a one Red Hill held locked a message, and the key to the lock was the message itself: “Turn your back on the paralleled rivers and railroads, and plunge into the byways that lead into the eternal hills, and you will find the world that was and still is.”
Let such a traveler but follow a lane that leads up through willow and elderberry, sassafras, laurel, wild cherry, and twining clematis—a lane alined with slender wood-maples, hickory, and mountain-ash, and flanked, where it gains the open, with scattered juniper and oak, and he will come out at last on the scenes of a country’s childhood.
At right angles to the lane, a broad way cuts the length of the hill, and loses itself in a dip at each end toward the valleys and the new world. The broad way is shaded by one of two trees, the domed maple or the stately elm. At the summit of its rise stands an old church the green shutters of which blend with the caressing foliage of primeval trees. Its white walls and towering steeple dominate the scene. White, too, are the houses that gleam from behind the verdure of unbroken lawns and shrubbery—all but one, the time-stained brick of which glows blood-red against the black green of clinging ivy.
Not all these homes are alive. Here a charred beam tells the story of a fire, there a mound of trailing vines tenderly hides from view the shame of a ruin, and there again stands a tribute to the power of the new age—a house the shutters of which are closed and barred. White now only in patches, its scaling walls have taken on the dull gray of neglected pine.
For generations the houses of Red Hill have sent out men, for generations they have taken them back. Their cupboards guard trophies from the seven seas, paid for with the Yankee nutmeg, swords wrought from plowshares and christened with the blood of the oppressor, a long line of collegiate sheepskins, and last, but by no means least, recipes the faded ink and brittle paper of which sum the essence of ages of culinary wisdom.
Some of these clustered homes live the year round at full swing, but the life of some is cut down to a minimum in the winter, only to spring up afresh in summer, like the new stalk from a treasured bulb. Of such was the little kingdom of Red Hill. Upon its long, level crest it bore only three centers of life and a symbol: Maple House, the Firs, and Elm House, half hidden from the road by their distinctive trees, but as alive as the warm eyes of a veiled woman; and the church.