LANDMARKS AND PERSONALITIES

smoke, cinders and coal dust seeped in around the windows and stuck to you on a hot day. The locomotive was also responsible  for forest fires during the dry season. Now and again a spark  would land on the peat bogs between Tower Hill and Cherry Brook and start a fire that smouldered for a week or so below the surface of the ground. There was nothing the fire department   could do except to keep an eye on it and take precautions     against its spreading into the woods.
   Looking at Weston Station today and the seldom used track passing close to it, gives little indication of the hustle and bustle   that once characterized the place. In 1916, when service reached its peak, twenty-three passenger trains stopped there every week-day as well as five scheduled freights.
  

   Strategically located on the hill just above Weston Station was Patrick J. McAuliffe's livery stable. My earliest recollections of McAuliffe's date back to the days before we drove to Boston in   an automobile. Sometimes we went by train, sometimes we     drove to Waltham and took a street car and sometimes we went   in one of Pat's carriages. In those days the main road through Weston was still unpaved and an automobile only a toy to be    used within a very limited radius.
   I was somewhat afraid of Pat because he was the chief of    police and could arrest me and put me in prison if he had a mind  to, and also because Mary used to tease me by saying, "I under-stand he's keeping a close watch on you," although she never explained why.
   My mother objected strongly to the use of checkreins and to docking horses' tails. Once in a while Pat, feeling in a devilish

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