est
to the romantic hillside, that the banded reptiles, which had been the
terror of the red men for nobody knows how many thousand years, were
there still, with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at the white
men's service, if they meddled with them.

The other natural features of Rockland were such as many of our pleasant
country-towns can boast of. A brook came tumbling down the mountain-side
and skirted the most thickly settled portion of the village. In the
parts of its course where it ran through the woods, the water looked
almost as brown as coffee flowing from its urn,--to say like smoky quartz
would perhaps give a better idea,--but in the open plain it sparkled over
the pebbles white as a queen's diamonds. There were huckleberry-pastures
on the lower flanks of The Mountain, with plenty of the sweet-scented
bayberry mingled with the other bushes. In other fields grew great store
of high-bush blackberries. Along the roadside were bayberry-bushes, hung
all over with bright red coral pendants in autumn and far into the
winter. Then there were swamps set thick with dingy alders, where the
three-leaved arum and the skunk's-cabbage grew broad and succulent,
shelving down into black boggy pools here and there at the edge of which
the green frog, stupidest of his tribe, sat waiting to be victimized by
boy or snapping-turtle long after the shy and agile leopard-frog had
taken the six-foot spring that plumped him into the middle of the pool.
And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair spread its flat disk of
embroidered fronds on the wire-like stem that glistened polished and
brown as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets, cheated by the
cold skies of their hues and perfume, sunned themselves like
white-cheeked invalids. Over these rose the old forest-trees,--the
maple, scarred with the wounds which had drained away its sweet
life-blood,--the beech, its smooth gray bark mottled so as to look like
the body of one of those great snakes of old that used to frighten
armies, always the mark of lovers' knives, as in the days of Musidora and
her swain,--the yellow birch, rough as the breast of Silenus in old
marbles,--the wild cherry, its little bitter fruit lying unheeded at its
foot,--and, soaring over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-limbed,
dark-mantled hemlock, in the depth of whose aerial solitudes the crow
brooded on her nest unscared, and the gray squirrel lived unharmed till
his incisors grew to l