of the treeland will enter your heart and the charm of the wildwood will flow through your veins.  You will never get away from it.  The sighing of the wind through the pine trees and the laughter of the stream in its rapids will sound through all your dreams.  On beds of silken softness you will long for the sleep-song of whispering leaves above your head, and the smell of a couch of balsam boughs.  At tables spread with dainty fare you will be hungry for the joy of the hunt, and for the angler’s sylvan feast.  In proud cities you will weary for the sight of a mountain trail; in great cathedrals you will think of the long, arching aisles of the woodland:  and in the noisy solitude of crowded streets you will hone after the friendly forest.

—­Henry Van Dyke:  The Blue Flower. 
(Copyright, 1902, Charles Scribner’s Sons.)

Running your eye across the map of the State, you see two slowly converging lines of railroad writhing out between the hills to the sea-coast.  Three other lines come down from north to south by the river valleys and the jagged shore.  Along these, huddled in the corners of the hills and the sea line, lie the cities and the larger towns.  A great majority of mankind, swarming in these little spots, or scuttling to and fro along the valleys on those slender lines, fondly dream they are acquainted with the land in which they live.  But beyond and around all this rises the wide, bare face of the country, which they will never know—­ the great patches of second-growth woods, the mountain pastures sown thick with stones, the barren acres of the hillside farmer—­a desolate land, latticed with gray New England roads, dotted with commonplace or neglected houses, and pitted with the staring cellars of the abandoned homes of disheartened and defeated men.

Out here in this semi-obscurity, where the regulating forces of society grow tardy and weak, strange and dangerous beings move to and fro, avoiding the apprehension of the law.  Occasionally we hear of them—­of some shrewd and desperate city fugitives brought to bay in a corner of the woods, or some brutal farmhouse murderer still lurking uncaptured among the hills.  Often they pass through the country and out beyond, where they are never seen again.

In the extreme southwestern corner of the State the railroads do not come; the vacant spaces grow between the country roads, and the cities dwindle down to half-deserted crossroads hamlets.  Here the surface of the map is covered up with the tortuous wrinkles of the hills.  It is a beautiful but useless place.  As far as you can see, low, unformed lumps of mountains lie jumbled aimlessly together between the ragged sky lines, or little silent cups of valleys stare up between them at their solitary patch of sky.  It seems a sort of waste yard of creation, flung full of the remnants of the making of the earth.

—­George Kibbe Turner:  Across the State ("McClure’s").