Millville is rather difficult to locate on the map, for the railroads found it impossible to run a line there, Chazy Junction, the nearest station, is several miles away, and the wagon road ascends the foothills every step of the distance.

There's a cross lane just beyond Pearson's, leading east and west, and a mile to westward is the Wegg Farm, in the wildest part of the foothills.

The tourist seldom penetrates these inaccessible foothills; the roads are too rough and primitive for automobiles; so Millville is shamefully neglected, and civilization halted there some half a century ago.

The virtues that counted in the foothills during the eighties were generosity, courage, and that amazing power of recuperation which enables a man to begin life again and again, undaunted by the bludgeonings of misfortune.

A RAGAMUFFIN OF THE FOOTHILLS XX.

In the early eighties, when my brother Ajax and I were raising cattle in the foothills of Southern California, our ranch-house was used as a stopping-place by the teamsters hauling freight across the Coast Range; and after the boom began, while the village of Paradise was evolving itself out of rough timber, we were obliged to furnish all comers with board and lodging.

The mouse ran round the room and vanished; the girl who had been sent to Paradise to keep in order the turbulent children of the foothills stepped down from her chair.

She laughed pleasantly, but with a faint inflection of derision, as if she knew, as she did, that the uncivilised children of the foothills, like their fathers, fear nothing on earth so much as rattlers and ridicule.

The humorists knew that Pap might have been the father of the foothills, the George Washington of Paradise, but he wasn't.

For all of us in the foothills except Pap Spooner.

The folks in these yere foothills need thinnin' anyway.

And, as I say, the scallywags in these yere foothills need thinnin'they need thinnin'.

He had not the honour of Andrew Spooner's acquaintance, and he had reason to believe that all men in the foothills were devoid of fear.

That's Paradise alone; in the foothills" "What brings you here?" It seemed hopeless to soften this hardened old man.

Their parties in town were as select as their picnics in the foothills, and the foothill picnics were the occasions where Cougarville society really came out.

He asked Miss Fleming on the way home if she would go with him to the picnic to be held in the wooded foothills on the following day.

There they were, the élite of Cougarville, up in a canyon of the foothills, beside a creek, where were trees and turf and picturesque rocks, and were having a good time.

It was up the foothills a mile or two above, and just beside the valley in which were the picnickers.

The men about the post were summoned, burros were loaded, and at 2 P.M. the whole rain-making force was far up the foothills unloading and preparing to fly gigantic kites and explode in the upper vaults of the atmosphere bombs and rockets and all sorts of things to make a rainstorm.

In the Cougarville Screamer of the following morning appeared a graphic account of the great exploit of "Professor" Gray, of the Department of Agriculture, who on the preceding day had, after taking his force into the foothills and utilizing the means at his command, attained the greatest rainfall of the season.

He could hear a coyote wailing off there in the foothills, and the rushing noise of the small mountain river that hurled itself down upon Millings, ran through it at frenzied speed, and made for the canon on the other side of the valley.

As they came to the opening of the cañon, the high mountain-top disappeared; the immediate foothills closed down and shut it out.

Schoolhouse in the foothills.

Schoolhouse in the foothills.

We were much worried at loosing our trail and felt that it would be quite unsafe to try to cross the mountain without finding it again, so we separated, Rogers going northwest, and I southwest, agreeing to swing round so as to meet again about noon, but when we met, neither of us had found a trail, and we were still about 10 miles from the foothills.