ico.
Some betook themselves into the wide, dusky barn, and lay there for
hours together on the odorous hay; while the sunstreaks and the shadows
strove together,--these to make the barn solemn, those to make it
cheerful,--and both were conquerors; and the swallows twittered a
cheery anthem, flashing into sight, or vanishing as they darted to and
fro among the golden rules of sunshine. And others went a little way
into the woods, and threw themselves on mother earth, pillowing their
heads on a heap of moss, the green decay of an old log; and, dropping
asleep, the bumblebees and mosquitoes sung and buzzed about their ears,
causing the slumberers to twitch and start, without awaking.

With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, and myself, it grew to be a
custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a certain rock. It was known
to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that the
venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to
an Indian auditory. The old pine forest, through which the Apostle's
voice was wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago. But the
soil, being of the rudest and most broken surface, had apparently never
been brought under tillage; other growths, maple and beech and birch,
had succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it was still as wild a
tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great grandson of one of
Eliot's Indians (had any such posterity been in existence) could have
desired for the site and shelter of his wigwam. These after-growths,
indeed, lose the stately solemnity of the original forest. If left in
due neglect, however, they run into an entanglement of softer wildness,
among the rustling leaves of which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as
it never could among the dark-browed pines.

The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite
bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with an irregular outline and many
fissures, out of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if the
scanty soil within those crevices were sweeter to their roots than any
other earth. At the base of the pulpit, the broken bowlders inclined
towards each other, so as to form a shallow cave, within which our
little party had sometimes found protection from a summer shower. On
the threshold, or just across it, grew a tuft of pale columbines, in
their season, and violets, sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla
was when we first knew her; children of the sun, who had