If she could have insured the same permanence in the village of Hilton,
outside the homestead enclosure, she would have been spared the cause of
her keenest unhappiness. For the hand of change was making havoc with the
village: the railroad had come, shops had been built, and stores and new
houses were going up on every side, and the beautiful hamlet, with its
score or two of old-fashioned dwellings, which had been the scene of her
girlhood, was in a fair way to be transformed into a vile manufacturing
village.
Miss Ludington, to whom every stick and stone of the place was dear,
could not walk abroad without missing some ancient landmark removed since
she had passed that way before, perhaps a tree felled, some meadow, that
had been a playground of her childhood, dug up for building-lots, or a
row of brick tenements going up on the site of a sacred grove.
Her neighbours generally had succumbed to the rage for improvement, as
they called it. There was a general remodelling and modernizing of
houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the
paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis.
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