Hillsboro People   By: Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958)

BY DOROTHY CANFIELD

AUTHOR OF THE BENT TWIG, THE SQUIRREL CAGE, ETC.

WITH OCCASIONAL VERMONT VERSES BY SARAH N. CLEGHORN

1915

CONTENTS

VERMONT (Poem) HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN (Poem) AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN PETUNIAS THAT'S FOR REMEMBRANCE THE HEYDAY OF THE BLOOD AS A BIRD OUT OF THE SNARE THE BEDQUILT PORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHER FLINT AND FIRE A SAINT'S HOURS (Poem) IN MEMORY OF L.H.W. IN NEW NEW ENGLAND THE DELIVERER NOCTES AMBROSIANAE (Poem) HILLSBORO'S GOOD LUCK SALEM HILLS TO ELLIS ISLAND (Poem) AVUNCULUS BY ABANA AND PHARPAR (Poem) FINIS A VILLAGE MUNCHAUSEN THE ARTIST WHO ELSE HEARD IT? (Poem) A DROP IN THE BUCKET THE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND (Poem) PIPER TIM ADESTE FIDELES! VERMONT

Wide and shallow in the cowslip marshes Floods the freshet of the April snow. Late drifts linger in the hemlock gorges, Through the brakes and mosses trickling slow Where the Mayflower, Where the painted trillium, leaf and blow.

Foliaged deep, the cool midsummer maples Shade the porches of the long white street; Trailing wide, Olympian elms lean over Tiny churches where the highroads meet. Fields of fireflies Wheel all night like stars among the wheat.

Blaze the mountains in the windless autumn Frost clear, blue nooned, apple ripening days; Faintly fragrant in the farther valleys Smoke of many bonfires swells the haze; Fair bound cattle Plod with lowing up the meadowy ways.

Roaring snows down sweeping from the uplands Bury the still valleys, drift them deep. Low along the mountain, lake blue shadows, Sea blue shadows in the hollows sleep. High above them Blinding crystal is the sunlit steep.

HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN

By orange grove and palm tree, we walked the southern shore, Each day more still and golden than was the day before. That calm and languid sunshine! How faint it made us grow To look on Hemlock Mountain when the storm hangs low!

To see its rocky pastures, its sparse but hardy corn, The mist roll off its forehead before a harvest morn; To hear the pine trees crashing across its gulfs of snow Upon a roaring midnight when the whirlwinds blow.

Tell not of lost Atlantis, or fabled Avalon; The olive, or the vineyard, no winter breathes upon; Away from Hemlock Mountain we could not well forego, For all the summer islands where the gulf tides flow.

AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN

"In connection with this phase of the problem of transportation it must be remembered that the rush of population to the great cities was no temporary movement. It is caused by a final revolt against that malignant relic of the dark ages, the country village and by a healthy craving for the deep, full life of the metropolis, for contact with the vitalizing stream of humanity." Pritchell's "Handbook of Economics," page 247.

Sometimes people from Hillsboro leave our forgotten valley, high among the Green Mountains, and "go down to the city," as the phrase runs, They always come back exclaiming that they should think New Yorkers would just die of lonesomeness, and crying out in an ecstasy of relief that it does seem so good to get back where there are some folks. After the desolate isolation of city streets, empty of humanity, filled only with hurrying ghosts, the vestibule of our church after morning service fills one with an exalted realization of the great numbers of the human race. It is like coming into a warmed and lighted room, full of friendly faces, after wandering long by night in a forest peopled only with flitting shadows. In the phantasmagoric pantomime of the city, we forget that there are so many real people in all the world, so diverse, so unfathomably human as those who meet us in the little post office on the night of our return to Hillsboro.