Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/15



had been created by two very different classes of home-makers, a fact which was obvious from its aspect. Its undistinguished frame buildings for the most part sheltered families who, having to live somewhere, had settled there where inadequate communication with the rest of the world kept rents down. Side by side with this drab majority, but mingling with it little, a few well-to-do business men had built comfortable, roomy homes in an uninspired compromise between their business connections in the city and their preference for open-air life for their families. This narrow ridge of trap rock continuing the Palisades southward between the partly reclaimed backlots of Hoboken and the immense, irreclaimable salt marshes of the Hackensack Valley, had a certain picturesqueness, had seemed to promise freedom from malaria (supposed at that time to result from the breathing the "miasma" hanging low about swamp land), and certainly offered fresher air than a flat on a New York street or a town beside a New Jersey marsh. It was a one-sided sort of compromise in which the families came out rather badly. Whatever natural beauty might be inherent in the site was largely nullified by the tawdry imaginings of small architects and building contractors, and despite popular medical theories, the malaria was about the same on the hill as on the flats. But though the advance of the suburban idea was already developing more attractive sites at no very great distance, few families moved away. With the massive immobility characteristic of humanity, the scattered well-to-do families of Union Hill stuck it out, grim and disillusioned, taking the consequences of their error of judgment rather than lose the sensation of stability, which means home.

Little Neale was quite unconscious of all this. To his ten-year-old thoughts "the Hill" was home, and where could you