Year: 1877

Helen Hunt, in independently


Never was an apostle more needed
Inc people are sitting in darkness fol
want OF him. He ought to journey uI
and down the land, through the length
and breadth of it, proclaiming the way
OF the Sun, and crying aloud: "Make
ye his paths straight. Open your win
dows, for why will We die 90


In the course of last summer and fall
| was in some twenty OF thirty New
England towns-in Massachusetts, in
New Hampshire, in Vermont. / dIove
every day from twelve to eighteen miles
up and down the hills, through the
beautiful valleys, along the dancing
water-cOurses. L know all the different
types of the New England rural home,
from the neat, precise, and often ornate
house of the well-tO-do man in the
manufacturing town, to the gray, wealth
er beaten, lichen-grown old house of the
poorest farmer among the hills. know
them all. love them all with that
loyalty to the soil which | sometimes
think is stronger in the New EnglandeI
than IN any other American. But
journeyed among them last autumn
with an ever increasing sense of pain
Ninety out of a hundred of these houses
are houses which no one familiar with
the laws of health can look at without
seeing at glance that the people who
live i'll them cannot be well. The aver
age New England house to-day has not
more than two or three of its blinds
open. 1t is a species of cellar. Some
of its rooms are worse than cellar
which has its door opened at least once
or twice day and few whiffs of all
let in. In the houses which are not
provided with blinds green paper cur
tains are hung inside and these are
kept down from morning till night
week in and week out, in all the rooms
except the kitchen.


But the shut blinds, bad as they are,
are not the worst thing in the New Eng
land villages and towns. The trees are
worse. The blind will of necessity get
opened once i'll a wilhelm spring and
fall, for the house cleaning, if no Oftener
but the tree which stands close to the
house, and shuts off every ray of direct,
full sunshine from it's windows, doors,
wall, making it not only dark, which is
gloomy and unwhOlesome, but damp,
which Is poisonous and deadly-the tree
is immOvable. 1t grows denser and
higher and broader every year; shuts
out, every year, more and more sun
shine; sheds, every year, more and
more damp moisture from its leaves.


| believe that it would not be an ex-
aggeratiOn to say that more than three
fourths of the houses of every New Eng
land village are shaded by trees to an
extent that cannot fail seriously to in
jure the health of all persons living in
them. | am sure that this is true of the
villages along the lines of the river
meadows. | think it is true of the hill
towns almost equally for that town
where | most love to stay lies thirteen
hundred feet above the sea, and yet its
main street is shaded might better
say shrouded-by a double row of great
sugar naples, which shut out the sun
light from the fronts of all the houses
almost as effectually as blankets would
hung up at their windows. l have
driven through many miles of village
streets in the Connecticut River mead
ows, where house after house was not
only sunless on its front, but looked
dark and sodden, as if it had been
asoak for years. So it had. Water is
not the only thing that you can soak in
Hang cloth out in a moist, fOggy all
all night and you can wiring drops OF
water out of it in the morning. Let
boards lie long in damp place, and
everybody knows they will decay
When boards stand upright, built into
house, they are no less sensitive to
damp than they were before. Surround
the house with damp-dealing trees, and
slowly, surely the boards are dampened
through. They will last and not actual
ly rot away for a century or mOIe-just
as the owner of them may live for the
best part of century in damp and
sunless room behind them; but the
house will feel chilly and smell musty
from garret to cellar. And as for the
man. what rheumatisms he will have
and how withered and decrepit he looks
A hale, hearty, full-faced, horid old
man in New England is sight you may
Journey many weeks without seeing
Yet in other countries it is a thing OF
every day. And it is not to be charged
to the stock. The New England stock
is of the hardest, else there would not
be old men at all, under such unfavoI-
ing conditions of hard work, rigorous
climate, no sunshine, and so little fresh
beef 1t is thankless task to attack
the trees; a dangerous one in some
communities. l have known terrible
i neighborhood feuds to arise by reason
of the selectmen's cutting down tree
The trees are the pride of the village
Strangers driving through the streets,
looking at the leafy bower simply as a
spectacle of foliage and color, exclain
at it and pay unthinking compliments
to the death-dealing shade. Soon the
town gets name abroad for the beauty
of its tree-lined streets, and then woe
betide the man who lays an ak at the
root of even one tree. He is traitor
he is no good citizen; he is man with
out taste.


Often there is a sentiment still stronger
than pride which allies itself to the
tree. 1t was planted by father, OIL
grandfather, or the man himself planted
it, and has watched its growth as he
has watched the growth of his child
He knows just how high it was thirty
wears ago. He remembers when ht
held ii in one hand, little sapling
and there is in his sentiment toward the