Some villages and farms suggest smugness in their prosperity.

They have a model-farm, business-like, well-regulated, up-to-date, company-financed air, suggesting such modern agricultural terms as "ensilage," "irrigation" and "fertilizer." Other villages and farms, while just as well-kept and well-to-do, have, so to say, a something romantic about their prosperity, a bounteous, ruddy, golden-age look about them, as though Nature herself had been the farmer and they had ruddied and ripened out of her own unconscious abundance--the difference between a row of modern box beehives and the old thatched-cottage kind.

The countryside of the Genesee valley has the romantic prosperous look.

Its farms and villages look like farms and villages in picture-books, and the country folk we met seemed happy and gay and kind, such as those one reads of in William Morris's romances of the golden age.

As from time to time we exchanged greetings with them, we were struck with their comely health and blithe ways--particularly with their fine teeth, as they laughed us the time of day, or stopped their wagons to gossip a moment with the two outlandish packmen--the very teeth one would expect in an apple-country.