much more in width, and the bringing of the hay in the same way, piled high upon a deck around the mast, instead of in the familiar farm wain, had many odd and pleasing aspects. 66 December, and thawed out for cultivation | across straits of half a mile, a mile, and about the first of May. There was no winter sowing. The principal crop, as in the State of Maine in general, was hay. The Deer Island farmer thought it would be worth double all the others put together. Next in importance came potatoes and barley. He got from one hundred and fifty to two hundred bushels of potatoes and thirty to forty of barley to the acre. He had corn and wheat as well; but warm sunshine to yellow his corn was often lacking, and though the yield of wheat was or could be made thirty-five to forty bushels an acre, with the most careful bolting it would hardly make white flour, and was not as good as cheap Western. He put on his lands a top-dressing of the refuse from the lobster factories, and also flats' mud, which he found excellent. On a good bitin' day" the farmer was apt to be off to sea in hot haste, leaving things on shore to the old men and boys, and even to the girls. One day Middleton saw a slender young woman swinging a scythe in a grass lot under the tuition of a Nestor leaning on a crutch, who rather severely scolded her for swinging it uphill instead of downward with the slope of the ground. The remark was common that in these times a living could not be got from either the land or the water alone. As far as his land operations were concerned, the islander esteemed that he conducted them in the usual way. He had the modern improvements; he attended the meetings of a farmers' club at Blue Hill, exhibited prize turnips at the county fair at Ellsworth, and would have promptly repudiated any idea of Imanners and customs," of having habits different from those of people in general, which could be a source of curiosity and entertain Two of his routine operations were especially novel to our visitor. He owned little outlying islands, which he devoted either to hay or the pasturage of sheep. In mild seasons the sheep ran at large there the year round, as untamed as the wild goats of Robinson Crusoe. At other times they must be brought off in the autumn, to be sheltered through the winter, and returned in the spring. These transfers, made in boats of moderate size, ment to anybody. 66 my dear," said the Doctor, anxiously. "Plenty of half-savage bear-hunters and moonshiners in North Carolina. But the Dutch or Scotch-Irish farmer has taken ed woman, and very fond of the girl, who led but a dull, drudging life at home, being one of the seven children of a poor clergyman. "It will brighten the whole year for possession of the most solitary recesses in the child," said the Doctor. the Pennsylvania mountains outside of the mining districts. His wife has her patent churn and wringer, her parlor with hair-cloth chairs, and photograph album on the table; his boy is at some cheap local college, and his daughter drapes her calico polonaise by the latest fashion in the Bazar." "Yes; and you know," added his wife, "I was her sponsor, George, and besides a brown alpaca dress once, I have never done a thing toward fulfilling my vows." The Doctor, therefore, with the two ladies, took passage for Harrisburg. They were equipped for the mountains, with valises, short flannel dresses, water-proofs, a pound or two of good tea, and a tin pot. The Doctor carried gun, fishing-tackle, and a flask of Scotch whiskey, which was his one catholic remedy, in the woods, for cuts, fevers, colds, or rattlesnake bites. At Harrisburg they took the Niagara'near' Pennsylvania hill farmer is perexpress to Lock Haven, a cheerful little lumber town lying high among the hills, where they spent the night. Early in the morning the Doctor called Sarah to the window of the inn parlor. There is my old friend Hoeven with the spring wagon. I wrote for him to meet us. Hoeven is the cabinet-maker among the Nittany Mountains." "I am afraid this is a civilized wilderness to which you are taking us, Doctor,' said Sarah. "No cabinet-makers adorned our Virginia Canaan." "Oh, the Pennsylvania spurs of the Alleghanies are tame compared with those of Virginia or the Carolinas. The very hills are levelled on top, you will observe, as if some ancient Dutch Gog or Magog had set his broad foot on every peak, flattening them down. Elk and McKean counties are tolerably savage, but even there the yellow farm-houses with green shutters and the big barn are beginning to show themselves. A few deer, bear, and foxes still hide up in the fastnesses of the hills to which we are going, but they are fast disappearing. There are no wolves nor panthers, such as we shall find in the higher ranges of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina and West Virginia. Every county in Pennsylvania is yoked down to civilization by a pike' and toll taxes.' 'I'm very glad to hear it," exclaimed his wife. "And what society shall we find, George ?" "You will not have a chance to study any of the picturesque phases of human nature, of which you are fond, I'm afraid, "But what kind of society is there?" demanded his wife, impatiently. "There is church twice a month, sewing bees, and apple-butter stirrings. The older women seldom leave their kitchens except to go to church. The wife of a haps the hardest-worked living being in the United States. But as for the girls, schools and magazines, and a day or two at the Exposition in 1876, have leavened the young people. The girl does not make as good butter as her mother, but she works tidies and decorates pickle jars. She has her lover, of course. He does not bring her flowers or opera tickets, but a leg of mutton weekly from the sheep his folks have killed. But there is as fine an aroma of love in it as in the costliest bouquet." "Don't talk such nonsense to Sarah," said Mrs. Mulock, sharply. What did we come to these mountains for, I wonder? If only to study vulgar love-making and tawdry apings of fashion, we need not have left New York." "We are going to study nature, and I am taking you to Centre and Clinton counties, my dear," said the Doctor, meekly, "because the mountains there, though lower than others in the range, are more precipitous and picturesque than any in the State. I can show you there in miniature the peculiar features of Californian scenery; the same effects of volcanic action on the hills, the great sand deposits, and the cañons. Hoeven a round squat figure, with a round red face on top of it-perched on the front seat of the spring wagon, drove them at a steady jog-trot across the hills, over a good country road. The day was sultry, but Hoeven wore a winter overcoat with two capes sunburned into different shades of yellow. "He does not countenance any whims of the seasons," said the Doctor, who was the most reticent of men at home; but the mountain air had loosened his tongue; he talked incessantly. "Hoeven does not countenance whims of any sort. He lives in the solid stone house that his grandfather built, and he will leave it to his oldest scn. The law of primogeniture is followed to that extent in the greater part of this State. The younger boys are sent off to seek their fortune in the West; but in the farm at home the oldest boy succeeds, and work and thought and talk run on in the same little ruts generation after generation. Hoeven's grandfather voted for Andrew Jackson years after Old Hickory was dead. There is always some Old Hickory to rule Pennsylvania with an iron rod, simply because there are so many Hoevens in the hills who are glad to pay him with office to do their thinking for them. John Owen's Solon Shingle is a study from the life of some Hoeven up here." The road ran southeast for a few miles through rich bottom-lands. Here and there a small, snug farm-house was set in a space absolutely bare of trees; an enormous red-roofed barn, corn-cribs, patent bee-hives, smoke-houses, and cider-presses huddled about it in a bare clayey yard. Outside were great orchards, dusky and cool in the hot noonlight, the gnarled trees soon to redden with old-fashioned Baldwins and Rambos and knotty golden quinces; beyond these the fields of Indian corn rolled over the low hills, the blades shining dark and green in the glare; or fields of oats, the wind sending gray ripples over them, or an ashy, feathery stretch of buckwheat, mounting up the hill-side. The farmer's wife, in her calico gown, her hair knotted in a little knob back from her sallow face, was usually in sight somewhere, and always at work. She was picking peas in the garden, or she was making soap in a huge smoking caldron hung over a fire near the well, or she was drawing great loaves of flaky bread from an oven in the yard, while innumerable pans of gingerbread or cherry pies waited their turn. There was the sluggish calm of physical luxury, of rude plenty, everywhere. The air was full of the odor of pig-pens and drying meat, mixed with new-mown hay and honeysuckles. Roses which were delicate nurslings with town florists ran riot in feverish crimson over the barns and hen neries; the endless lines of hills which walled in every landscape were fawn-colored with the early chestnut blossoms. "Tons of these nuts rot every year in this State alone," boasted the Doctor. "There are enough chestnuts wasted in our mountain ranges from the lakes to Georgia to feed all famishing India. This is the best-fed country in the world, and old Pennsylvania is the best-fed State in it." Our travellers were offered boarding in the hill farm-houses at from three to five dollars per week. They found shelter in an old house which lay directly in a gorge between two mountains; the creek, which ran brawling down the gap, swept past on either side of it, and met again, leaving it on a little island, accessible only by stepping-stones, which were always covered by high water. In all of the seventy years in which its owner had lived in the house it had not occurred to him to make a bridge of a couple of planks. "It is a place for a murder," declared Mrs. Mulock. The house was gray and the fences gnawed with age. Old Nittany, a ragged, stern mountain, inaccessible except to bears and rattlesnakes, frowned heavily down upon it; the stream was full of whispering voices; a cold wind blew perpetually down the gorge. But the Doctor and Sarah found as much delight and beauty in this cut of the hills as if it had been the Vale of Cashmere. They fished for trout, or went on law-defying hunts for woodcock; they rode up the nearly perpendicular wagon-trails left by the charcoal-burners; they made friends on the few half-tilled patches grouped about the yellow store and post-office, in which the feeble gossip of these lonely hill farms found universal tongue and ears, and where the proprietor dispensed letters, boots, calicoes, sugar, and spiritualistic doctrines to all comers. Many of the great gorges near Nittany are simply clefts of the hills made by volcanic action: the bare, disjointed cliffs stand opposite, a valley or stream between, alike in every angle and break, as though waiting for some supreme word to join them again. The hills in Nittany Gap are perhaps the most remarkable in the State; they are heaps of millions of bowlders, from the size of an egg to a mass weighing many tons, piled upon each other skyward in wild confusion. Some of these hills are absolutely bare of vegeta tion; there is not a tree nor blade of grass "Hoeven is an excellent match for her upon them; nothing but the slimy moss -a well-to-do, shrewd fellow," said Mrs. will cling to the smooth bowlders. Bears Mulock. "I'll send them a wedding presand foxes find ready-made dens in the crev-ent when we go home-something useices of the larger rocks, and there is no pleasanter nursery and breeding-place for rattlesnakes in the States in summer than these heaps of hot bare stones. Miss Davidger rode alone every day through the Nittany, Gray Eagle, and Muncy hills: many large tracts were uninhabited, but they lacked the atmosphere of isolation and remoteness of the southern ranges. The wood sounds told of the near neighborhood of man; they were half human with the hum of bees, the c-r-r-r of the locust, the busy calls and domestic talk of the smaller sociable songbirds. There was no mystery in these woods. Sarah had always the odd feeling that they were an outer suburb of the familiar parsonage garden. Sometimes Victoria went with her. Victoria was the daughter of the house-an ugly, scrawny, soft-voiced girl of eighteen, her skin yellow and teeth black with steady diet of pork and strong coffee. She jogged along, perched on an enormous white mare, her sun-bonnet, dyed saffron with annotto, flapping about her face she told to Sarah every day her one story of the journey she had once made to Bellefontaine, in the next county, and of the remarkable spring that was there, "the like of which she heard was not in Europe." It had been her one glimpse of the world. | Pork and coffee had tainted her no deeper than the skin. At heart she was a pure, modest little woman. But "Quite too fine a nature," Sarah declared, "to be lost in the wilderness." She began to lay plans to rescue Victoria, and bring her out into the world. the first Sunday evening appeared Hoeven, superb in a mulberry velveteen waistcoat and blue satin scarf. "Mr. Hoeven," Victoria timidly stated to her new friends, "is a widderer, and keepin' company with me." They took their places solemnly in front of the shining cold stove in the diningroom, and the door was closed upon them. The Doctor followed Sarah to the porch, laughing at her disappointment, but she would not joke about it. "There's something in the girl that has lived in spite of her ignorance and ugliness and solitude," she said; "but Hoeven will smother it." ful." The next day the two girls, mounted on the plough horse and mare, followed an old Indian trail across the ridge into the Muncy Mountains. The sky was filled all day with a spongy mist, through which the sun showed but a nebulous depth of watery light. They rode from height to height, the forests rolling in unbroken billows to the horizon, the nearer hills tinged pink with laurel. When they were about five miles from home, the mist thickened into a steady down-pour of rain, and horizon, hills, and rosy banks suddenly went out into a cold wet fog. What is the matter with you, Victoria?" said Sarah, crossly. "Are you afraid?" "Yes, I am. These hills are full of deserted shafts left by the iron-miners. Look a-there!"-dragging back her mule from the edge of a pit a hundred feet deep, the mouth of which was hidden by blackberry bushes. "I don't know the way home either. If Mr. Hoeven was here, he'd tell us what to do." "Hoeven, indeed!" muttered Sarah, who was gasping under the breathless dashes of rain. "Are there no human beings at all on this ridge?" “Only the charcoal-burners. The men live alone, and they're counted no better than beasts," cried Victoria, with fresh alarm. Sarah, pushing through the thicket, suddenly came to a clearing, in the middle of which were two smouldering hillocks of charcoal. A hut of logs was built under the trees. About fifty chickens were cooped at one side, and on the eaves of the hut and on the trunks of the trees were nailed boxes for the birds, of every shape and size. "It's not a wild beast that lives here," she said, decisively, rapping on the door with her whip handle. A man came out, dressed in rags; he was an erect, powerful fellow, with a clear, direct glance. After one stare of amazement, he jerked off his cap, took their bridles without a word, and led the horses under his poultry shed. "The roof here is better than that of the house," he said. "Don't be frightened, ma'am. The rain is nigh over." He stood hold |