HEDGES IN FRAMING GATEWAYS and Muster Day. On all holidays, but especially at Commencement time, booths, tents, and stands were erected there, and auctioneers and fakirs of all descriptions made it their headquarters. At one end of the place was a frog-pond, and Dr. Hitchcock, the venerable dean of the College, tells how he occasionally fished his children out of its by no means limpid wa ters. But the Common's usefulness as a frog-pond and as a county fair ground was doomed when, in 1853, the Massachusetts General Court passed an act providing for 1 societies "to encourage agriculture, horticulture, or the improvement and ornamentation of the streets and public the object expressed in the act of 1853. The town soon gave over the control of the Common to the Association, whose chief work for a half-century since A WELL-SHADED WALK squares of any town by planting and cultivating ornamental trees therein." Four years later the Amherst Ornamental Tree Association was formed, with has been to improve and care for the forty-odd acres intrusted to it. The Association's most successful and comprehensive work was done in 1875, when plans drawn by the late Frederick Law Olmsted for improving the Common were carried into effect. In 1877 the society dropped its quaint and restricted title of "Ornamental Tree Association" and became the "Village Improvement Association." To-day the society has about one hundred and fifty members, both men and women, who pay dues of one dollar a year. The sum of one hundred and fifty dollars, raised in this way, is sufficient to keep the Common in good con dition and also furnish funds for a committee which has the care of certain streets. Although the society has long been under efficient direction, it misses the leadership of the late Austin Dickinson, a former treasurer of Amherst College, whose executive ability and public spirit, more than anything else, made possible the transformation of the Common from a swampy fair ground into a splendid stretch of park land. The value of the work done by the Improvement Association has not by any means been confined to its care of the village common. Even in New England towns the spirit of materialism and commercialism is sometimes rife, and this spirit the society has constantly fought, in doing which it has exerted an educative influence, not only upon the immediate community, but also upon the group of hamlets of which Amherst is the center. More than one proposal has been made to turn the Common into a ball-field or to build a trolley line through it; but the Association has silenced all such schemes, and every victory has increased the general appreciation of the value of its work. A still better indication of the influence exerted by the Association is the fact that four neighboring villages have organized societies with similar purposes and methods. When money was first spent to improve the Common, it was raised by a general tax upon all the villages comprising the town of Amherst. This method, however, was so strenuously objected to by the outlying villages that the Association had to raise funds for the extensive improvements of 1875 by private subscriptions. But when the work was completed, the taxpayers of North Amherst, Amherst City, East and South Amherst came to realize its value, and have since organized local societies to care for the small commons and squares in their respective villages. Through the generosity of one of its former residents, Amherst has recently acquired another tract of park land. A low, marshy piece of property near the northern end of the Common, of about the same size and shape as the plot on which the Flatiron Building in New York stands, has been ceded to the town by J. Howard Sweetser. The property is so much lower than the surrounding street levels that the landscape architects decided to utilize its peculiar level and convert it into a sunken garden. The plans call for a garden after formal Italian models, and its formality has seemed to some out of place in a New England village; yet the striking appropriateness of a sunken garden on the particular plot of land in question can hardly be denied. When the work is completed, the place will undoubtedly be turned over to the Village Association to care for, as the Common was fifty years ago. Amherst is a village well off the main lines of travel; but it has a host of scattered admirers. For eighty-two years the graduates of its College have gone out into the world with as grateful a memory of the beauty of their college town as of their books or sports. Amherst's greatest alumnus, Henry Ward Beecher, spent a good part of his four years wandering over the near-by hillsides, and he has left some recollections of the region in his novel "Norwood." At a recent reunion, the class of Ninety-three conceived the idea of greatly extending and emphasizing those features of the village which have made it such an trustees, of which William R. Mead, of the firm of McKim, Mead & White, is a member. Elaborate plans made some time ago for the Village Association by Frederick Law Olmsted cover a part of the proposed improvements; and if the three organizations can work together, it is safe to predict results of a brilliant character. A still more recent development was the appointment by the College trustees of an honorary commission to make plans for beautifying the grounds and DORMITORIES AND CHAPEL attractive college town. Their plans, as far as formulated, provide for such improvements in the approaches to the village and in its environs as will bring them into harmony with the campus and the Common. At present there is no navigable body of water near Amherst, and the scheme further provides for the building of an artificial lake, if such a project is practicable. The class has already raised a large fund for surveys, and its committee is working in conjunction with a committee of the College for the proper sites of buildings. The commission includes, besides Mr. Mead, four members of the Washington Park Commission, which was appointed by the Senate to plan for the extension of the park system in Washington, D. C. They are Daniel H. Burn ham, Augustus any proposed for grounds. After all, the best assurance of the progress of village improvement in a town like Amherst is the spirit which the citizens of the town manifest towards the movement. The people of Amherst have indeed been fortunate in having a man such as Frederick Law Olmsted to plan for them; but they are still more fortunate in possessing a keen appreciation of the practical as well as the æsthetic value of the village beautiful. Amherst was one of the first towns to |