THRUMS Thrums is the name I give here to the handful of houses jumbled together in a cup, which is the town nearest the schoolhouse.

Until twenty years ago its every other room, earthen-floored and showing the rafters overhead, had a handloom, and hundreds of weavers lived and died Thoreaus "ben the hoose" without knowing it.

In those days the cup overflowed and left several houses on the top of the hill, where their cold skeletons still stand.

The road that climbs from the square, which is Thrums's heart, to the north is so steep and straight, that in a sharp frost children hunker at the top and are blown down with a roar and a rush on rails of ice.

At such times, when viewed from the cemetery where the traveller from the schoolhouse gets his first glimpse of the little town, Thrums is but two church steeples and a dozen red stone patches standing out of a snow-heap.