Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill The Real Thing — And Truly Rural PRIVATE MULVANEY, who was "a corpril wanst but rayjooced aftherwards," is quoted by Mr. Kipling as saying, " No more will I name places, for a man is thracked by a place." Accordingly, you will gain little by searching the " B'gosh Belt" of New England for the " taown o' Thorpe" (population 350) where I supplied the pulpit for four Sundays preceding my ordination to the ministry at large. I should hate to be " thracked," for I mean to be frank about Thorpe. It should never have been built. Lost among the hills, where farming by machinery is out of the question, it has been drained of its best people for years and years by the thriving valley-towns and the still more thriving West. All the plucky, ambitious, aggressive spirits have got out. It is a victim of natural selection the wrong end to — i. e., the survival of the unflttest. And yet how amusing! When I alighted from the train at West Thorpe, one chilly Saturday evening in May, the station was dark, and the only vehicle in sight a rickety, mud-spattered buggy, whose driver got down from his perch and said to me, " Be you the minister? " On my acknowledging that I was the next thing to a minister and doubtless the man he sought, he said, " I'll carry you over." I hopped in, and, after taking off his nag's blanket and folding it, he looked up at me and said, "Highst!" I hesitated, not understanding. " Highst!" he repeated. " Higbst up, so's I can put this here blanket on the seat." That was my first impression of Thorpe, and it tickled me as hugely, almost, as a joke of " Mo " Glenn's after church next day. The service had been enlivened by the funniest tenor solo I had ever heard, and " Mo " Glenn, at whose house I was entertained, said to me, " Haow did you like Unc...