ICE GLEN. again. Giant hem locks and other trees have now grown upon and among these rocks, and covered the sides of the great rift to the very top. The place is wild and impressive in the extreme. You step at once from the warm, sunny pasture-ground without into a cool, dark grotto or labyrinth. The transition is sudden and complete. You go now over and now under the great masses of rock piled, as by the hands of Titans, one upon another. Now you cross from side to side upon a bridge made by some fallen hemlock, so beautifully matted with its enveloping mosses that you hesitate to touch it with the foot selves have each their several and special lest tne wood-nymphs cry out at your invaattractions. Monument Mountain, which sion and pollution of their halls. Now you lifts itself on the southern border of the are fain to slide down the smooth face of a town as the grand mountain feature of the rock, steadied by your climbing-staff, and ocplace, with its eastern wall of bare perpen-casionally you pause to look up from some dicular rock to which not a tree can cling-depth, and catch, as from a well, a glimpse how many know something of it since Bry- of the blue sky, never more "deeply, darkly, ant has enshrined it in his verse! From its beautifully blue" than from such a point of summit one looks off upon the Catskills, and view. To go through this glen, so wildly his eye sweeps from old Graylock on the beautiful, is an event long to be rememnorth to the Litchfield hills in Connecticut, bered. Its grand rocks can not be forgotwhile around and beneath him the land lies ten. Its ferns and mosses will keep their like a garden of beauty. greenness and grow in memory for a lifetime. "It is a fearful thing The mountain columns with which earth props heaven." It is but the walk of a few minutes from the northern opening of the glen to a beautiful eminence which the Housatonic seems to have cut off from Bear Mountain, and left right in the midst of the village as a little bit of wildness and natural beauty furnished for the convenience of invalids and little children. This is Laurel Hill-so called from the abundance of the kalmia, which grows upon its sides in great beauty. The and separated from the main street of the hill is, perhaps, a hundred feet in height, town only by an intervening meadow of an acre or two in extent, upon which, with an unusual felicity of position, stands the village academy. Half-way up the hill, on its western side, is a plateau large enough to accommodate two thousand people. This plateau is backed on the east by a perpendicular wall of rock thirty feet or more in height. And here, amidst the tall trees kept of a library, must be of considerable size, in most cases, at the outset. It must be large enough to make a decided impression upon the public by the variety and richness of its contents. It must be large enough to have a value which shall make all feel that it is worth caring for, worth preserving, and worth making constant additions to. In such a case a proper building will be likely to be provided, a librarian will be not secondary to that of groceries or drygoods; and, what is more, the sight of such a feast will stimulate the mental appetite of the community, and the taste of the feast will cause them to secure its continuance. free from underbrush, the villagers are ac- | ily, in order to live and do the proper work customed to meet on occasions of public and social interest. Especially it is used by the Laurel Hill Association, which takes its name from the hill, and has for its object the beautifying of the town by causing art and taste to lend a helping hand to nature. This it does by keeping the village streets in good condition, bordering them with nicely graveled walks, kept clean and well graded; by planting rows of trees for shade along all the highways of the town; by keep-secured, who will make the care of the books ing the village cemetery in proper order; and, in general, by encouraging a spirit of taste among all the inhabitants. It spends hundreds of dollars annually in this work, and every year, in August, it holds its anniversary upon the hill itself. A rostrum of earth, covered with turf, is built against the wall of rock of which we have spoken, and which acts as a sounding-board for the help of the speaker. From this rostrum the secretary of the Association reads the record of its doings for the past year. The election of officers then takes place. An oration, and usually a poem, are then recited to the listening auditors. Afterward impromptu speeches are made by one and another, and the good work is thus encouraged for another year. It is the great day of the year Such was the start of the library at Stockbridge only half a dozen years ago. A purchase of two thousand volumes was made at the outset. A beautiful stone building was erected for them. When its doors were opened the public saw and felt that they had a treasure in their possession. The town at once assumed the payment of a librarian's services, and enabled the managers to open the library to the public every day, instead of but once a week, as had been expected, and as is so often the case with village libraries; and so almost at once the library became a manifest power in that com in this New England village. Closely allied to the Laurel Hill Associa-munity. The town would not be willing tion, though not such a peculiarity of Stock- now to give it up for ten times what it has bridge, is another institution, which ought, cost. It is the crowning embellishment of at least, to be mentioned. This is the pub- the most beautiful of Berkshire villages. lic library. A village library, to be sure, is no new thing; and yet a truly successful library is somewhat rare. The history of too many has been somewhat like this: one or two hundred dollars expended in the purchase of a few books, so few that they were not worth the care of a special custodian or a building specially adapted to their preservation, and so were thrust into the corner of some post-office or grocery store, where, after a little interest and attention on the part of the public, and a little gratuitous service on the part of the postmaster or grocer, the books were neglected. forgotten, and lost. good village library, especially in these days. when books of some sort are found in every fam A THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, STOCKBRIDGE. THE JOHNNY APPLESEED. JOHNNY APPLESEED. A PIONEER HERO. THE "far West" is rapidly becoming only a traditional designation: railroads have destroyed the romance of frontier life, or have surrounded it with so many appliances of civilization that the pioneer character is rapidly becoming mythical. The men and women who obtain their groceries and dry-goods from New York by rail in a few hours have nothing in common with those who, fifty years ago, "packed" salt a hundred miles to make their mush palatable, and could only exchange corn and wheat for molasses and calico by making long and perilous voyages in flat-boats down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. Two generations of frontier lives have accumulated stores of narrative which, like the small but beautiful tributaries of great rivers, are forgotten in the broad sweep of the larger current of history. The march of Titans sometimes tramples out the memory of smaller but more useful lives, and sensational glare often eclipses more modest but purer lights. This has been the case in the popular demand for the dime novel dilutions of Fenimore Cooper's romances of border life, which have preserved the records of Indian rapine and atrocity as the only memorials of pioneer history. But the early days of Western settlement witnessed sublimer heroisms than those of human torture, and no bler victories than those of the tomahawk and scalping-knife. Among the heroes of endurance that was voluntary, and of action that was creative and not sanguinary, there was one man whose name, seldom mentioned now save by some of the few surviving pioneers, deserves to be perpetuated. The first reliable trace of our modest hero finds him in the Territory of Ohio, in 1801, with a horse-load of apple seeds, which he planted in various places on and about the borders of Licking Creek, the first orchard thus originated by him being on the farm of Isaac Stadden, in what is now known as Licking County, in the State of Ohio. During the five succeeding years, although he was undoubtedly following the same strange occupation, we have no authentic account of his movements until we reach a pleasant spring day in 1806, when a pioneer settler in Jefferson County, Ohio, noticed a peculiar craft, with a remarkable occupant and a curious cargo, slowly dropping down with the current of the Ohio River. It was "Johnny Appleseed," by which name Jonathan Chapman was afterward known in every logcabin from the Ohio River to the Northern lakes, and westward to the prairies of what is now the State of Indiana. With two canoes lashed together he was transporting a load of apple seeds to the Western frontier, for the purpose of creating orchards on the farthest verge of white settlements. With his canoes he passed down the Ohio to Marietta, where he entered the Muskingum, ascending the stream of that river until he reached the mouth of the Walhonding, or White Woman Creek, and still onward, up the Mohican, into the Black Fork, to the head of navigation, in the region now known as Ashland and Richland counties, on the line of the Pittsburg and Fort Wayne Railroad, in Ohio. A long and toilsome voyage it was, as a glance at the map will show, and must have occupied a great deal of time, as the lonely traveler stopped at every inviting spot to plant the seeds and make his infant nurseries. These are the first well-authenticated facts in the history of Jonathan Chapman, whose birth, there is good reason for believing, occurred in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1775. According to this, which was his own statement in one of his less reticent moods, he was, at the time of his appearance on Licking Creek, twenty-six years of age, and whether im dians, found it necessary to guard against the attacks of the insidious enemies in the grass by wrapping bandages of dried grass around his buckskin leggings and moccasins; but Johnny would shoulder his bag of apple seeds, and with bare feet penetrate to some remote spot that combined picturesqueness and fertility of soil, and there he would plant his seeds, place a slight inclos grow until the trees were large enough to pelled in his eccentricities by some absolute misery of the heart which could only find relief in incessant motion, or governed by a benevolent monomania, his whole after-life was devoted to the work of planting apple seeds in remote places. The seeds he gathered from the cider-presses of Western Pennsylvania; but his canoe voyage in 1806 appears to have been the only occasion upon which he adopted that method of transport-ure around the place, and leave them to ing them, as all his subsequent journeys were made on foot. Having planted his stock of seeds, he would return to Pennsylvania for a fresh supply, and, as sacks made of any less substantial fabric would not endure the hard usage of the long trip through forests dense with underbrush and briers, he provided himself with leathern bags. Securely packed, the seeds were conveyed, sometimes on the back of a horse, and not unfrequently on his own shoulders, either over a part of the old Indian trail that led from Fort Duquesne to Detroit, by way of In personal appearance Chapman was a Fort Sandusky, or over what is styled in the small, wiry man, full of restless activity; he appendix to "Hutchins's History of Boguet's had long dark hair, a scanty beard that was Expedition in 1764" the "second route never shaved, and keen black eyes that through the wilderness of Ohio," which sparkled with a peculiar brightness. His would require him to traverse a distance of dress was of the oddest description. Genone hundred and sixty-six miles in a west-erally, even in the coldest weather, he went northwest direction from Fort Duquesne barefooted, but sometimes, for his long jourin order to reach the Black Fork of the Mo- neys, he would make himself a rude pair of hican. sandals; at other times he would wear any cast-off foot-covering he chanced to finda boot on one foot and an old brogan or a moccasin on the other. It appears to have been a matter of conscience with him never to purchase shoes, although he was rarely without money enough to do so. On one occasion, in an unusually cold November, while he was traveling barefooted through mud and snow, a settler who happened to possess a pair of shoes that were too small for his own use forced their acceptance upon Johnny, declaring that it was sinful for a human being to travel with naked feet in such weather. A few days afterward the donor was in the village that has since become the thriving city of Mansfield, and met his beneficiary contentedly plodding along with his feet bare and half frozen. With some degree of anger he inquired for the cause of such foolish conduct, and received for reply that Johnny had overtaken a poor, barefooted family moving Westward, and as they appeared to be in much greater need of clothing than he was, he had given them the shoes. His dress was generally composed of cast-off clothing, that he had taken in payment for apple-trees; and as the pioneers were far less extravagant than their descend This region, although it is now densely populated, still possesses a romantic beauty that railroads and bustling towns can not obliterate a country of forest-clad hills and green valleys, through which numerous bright streams flow on their way to the Ohio; but when Johnny Appleseed reached some lonely log-cabin he would find himself in a veritable wilderness. The old settlers say that the margins of the streams, near which the first settlements were generally made, were thickly covered with a low, matted growth of small timber, while nearer to the water was a rank mass of long grass, interlaced with morning-glory and wild pea vines, among which funereal willows and clustering alders stood like sentinels on the outpost of civilization. The hills, that rise almost to the dignity of mountains, were crowned with forest trees, and in the coverts were innumerable bears, wolves, deer, and droves of wild hogs, that were as ferocious as any beast of prey. In the grass the massasauga and other venomous reptiles lurked in such numbers that a settler named Chandler has left the fact on record that during the first season of his residence, while mowing a little prairie which formed part of his land, he killed over two hundred black rat-ants in such matters, the homespun and tlesnakes in an area that would involve an average destruction of one of these reptiles for each rod of land. The frontiers-man, who felt himself sufficiently protected by his rifle against wild beasts and hostile In buckskin garments that they discarded would not be very elegant or serviceable. In his later years, however, he seems to have thought that even this kind of second-hand raiment was too luxurious, as his principal "THE TRIBES OF THE HEATHEN ARE ROUND ABOUT YOUR DOORS, AND A DEVOURING FLAME FOLLOWETII AFTER THEM." and, what is a better test, the boys of the settlements forbore to jeer at him. With grownup people and boys he was usually reticent, but manifested great affection for little girls, always having pieces of ribbon and gay calico to give to his little favorites. Many a grandmother in Ohio and Indiana can remember the presents she received when a child from poor homeless Johnny Appleseed. When he consented to eat with any family he would never sit down to the table until he was assured that there was an ample supply for the children; and his sympathy for their youthful troubles and his kindness toward them made him friends among all the juveniles of the borders. The Indians also treated Johnny with the greatest kindness. By these wild and sanguina garment was made of a coffee sack, in which | ry savages he was regarded as a "great he cut holes for his head and arms to pass through, and pronounced it "a very serviceable cloak, and as good clothing as any man need wear." In the matter of head-gear his taste was equally unique; his first experiment was with a tin vessel that served to cook his mush, but this was open to the objection that it did not protect his eyes from the beams of the sun; so he constructed a hat of pasteboard with an immense peak in front, and having thus secured an article that combined usefulness with economy, it became his permanent fashion. medicine man," on account of his strange appearance, eccentric actions, and, especially, the fortitude with which he could endure pain, in proof of which he would often thrust pins and needles into his flesh. His nervous sensibilities really seem to have been less acute than those of ordinary people, for his method of treating the cuts and sores that were the consequences of his barefooted wanderings through briers and thorns was to sear the wound with a red-hot iron, and then cure the burn. During the war of 1812, when the frontier settlers were torThus strangely clad, he was perpetually tured and slaughtered by the savage allies wandering through forests and morasses, of Great Britain, Johnny Appleseed continand suddenly appearing in white settle- ued his wanderings, and was never harmments and Indian villages; but there must ed by the 1oving bands of hostile Indians. have been some rare force of gentle goodness On many occasions the impunity with which dwelling in his looks and breathing in his he ranged the country enabled him to give words, for it is the testimony of all who the settlers warning of approaching danger knew him that, notwithstanding his ridicu-in time to allow them to take refuge in their lous attire, he was always treated with the block-houses before the savages could attack greatest respect by the rudest frontiers-man, them. Our informant refers to one of these |