I thought of that deserted Southern garden as I followed my own New England road.  The flower-plots were in gay bloom all along the way; almost every house had some flowers before it, sometimes carefully fenced about by stakes and barrel staves from the miscreant hens and chickens which lurked everywhere, and liked a good scratch and fluffing in soft earth this year as well as any other.  The world seemed full of young life.  There were calves tethered in pleasant shady spots, and puppies and kittens adventuring from the doorways.  The trees were full of birds:  bobolinks, and cat-birds, and yellow-hammers, and golden robins, and sometimes a thrush, for the afternoon was wearing late.  We passed the spring which once marked the boundary where three towns met,—­Berwick, York, and Wells,—­a famous spot in the early settlement of the country, but many of its old traditions are now forgotten.  One of the omnipresent regicides of Charles the First is believed to have hidden himself for a long time under a great rock close by.  The story runs that he made his miserable home in this den for several years, but I believe that there is no record that more than three of the regicides escaped to this country, and their wanderings are otherwise accounted for.  There is a firm belief that one of them came to York, and was the ancestor of many persons now living there, but I do not know whether he can have been the hero of the Baker’s Spring hermitage beside.  We stopped to drink some of the delicious water, which never fails to flow cold and clear under the shade of a great oak, and were amused with the sight of a flock of gay little country children who passed by in deep conversation.  What could such atoms of humanity be talking about?  “Old times,” said John, the master of horse, with instant decision.

We met now and then a man or woman, who stopped to give us hospitable greeting; but there was no staying for visits, lest the daylight might fail us.  It was delightful to find this old-established neighborhood so thriving and populous, for a few days before I had driven over three miles of road, and passed only one house that was tenanted, and six cellars or crumbling chimneys where good farmhouses had been, the lilacs blooming in solitude, and the fields, cleared with so much difficulty a century or two ago, all going back to the original woodland from which they were won.  What would the old farmers say to see the fate of their worthy bequest to the younger generation?  They would wag their heads sorrowfully, with sad foreboding.

After we had passed more woodland and a well-known quarry, where, for a wonder, the derrick was not creaking and not a single hammer was clinking at the stone wedges, we did not see any one hoeing in the fields, as we had seen so many on the white rose road, the other side of the hills.  Presently we met two or three people walking sedately, clad in their best clothes.  There was a subdued air of public excitement and concern, and one of us remembered that there had been a death in the neighborhood; this was the day of the funeral.  The man had been known to us in former years.  We had an instinct to hide our unsympathetic pleasuring, but there was nothing to be done except to follow our homeward road straight by the house.