Excerpt........One fair morning, a good many years ago, a number of schoolgirls were waiting at a little wayside station on the banks of the Connecticut River. They had crossed the river in a ferry-boat and were waiting for more of their number who w ... Read more

Excerpt........One fair morning, a good many years ago, a number of schoolgirls were waiting at a little wayside station on the banks of the Connecticut River. They had crossed the river in a ferry-boat and were waiting for more of their number who were coming after them. They were waiting patiently enough. It was a good place in which to wait, for the scene around them was very lovely. They were standing at the foot of Mount Tom, glorious in the morning sunshine, and looking over on the shadows which still lingered on the face of Mount Holyoke. From the far north flows the Connecticut River broadening on its way, as Green Mountain and White send down on either hand, from melting snow-drifts and hidden springs, their tribute to its waters. Through forests and broken hill country, through meadows, sometimes broad and sometimes narrow, past town and village and lonely farmhouse, it flows before it makes a bend to pass between Mounts Tom and Holyoke, but in all its course it flows through no fairer landscape than that which spreads itself around the base of these two historic mountains. Over all the land lay the promise of spring in the glory of cloudless sunshine. Only the promise as yet. The mountains were still bare and brown, with patches of snow lingering in hollow and crevice; and the great elms that were everywhere—in the village streets, along the roads that wound between the hills, and around the white farmhouses—showed no tinge of green as yet, but their brown buds were ready and waiting to burst; the meadows were growing green and the catkins were large and full on the willows by the brooks that hastened through them to the river. There was a soft tinge, half green, half golden, on earlier trees growing in sheltered places; and the promise of the spring was everywhere—more joyfully welcomed after a long winter than spring in the full glory of leaf and blossom. Less