f in that way, even when it stands alone in the middle of a
pasture,) but grating their boughs against each other, as old horn-handed
farmers press their dry, rustling palms together, dropping a nut or a
leaf or a twig, clicking to the tap of a woodpecker, or rustling as a
squirrel flashes along a branch. It was now the season of singing-birds,
and the woods were haunted with mysterious, tender music. The voices of
the birds which love the deeper shades of the forest are sadder than
those of the open fields: these are the nuns who have taken the veil, the
hermits that have hidden themselves away from the world and tell their
griefs to the infinite listening Silences of the wilderness,--for the one
deep inner silence that Nature breaks with her fitful superficial sounds
becomes multiplied as the image of a star in ruffled waters. Strange!
The woods at first convey the impression of profound repose, and yet, if
you watch their ways with open ear, you find the life which is in them is
restless and nervous as that of a woman: the little twigs are crossing
and twining and separating like slender fingers that cannot be still; the
stray leaf is to be flattened into its place like a truant curl; the
limbs sway and twist, impatient of their constrained attitude; and the
rounded masses of foliage swell upward and subside from time to time with
long soft sighs, and, it may be, the falling of a few rain-drops which
had lain hidden among the deeper shadows. I pray you, notice, in the
sweet summer days which will soon see you among the mountains, this
inward tranquillity that belongs to the heart of the woodland, with this
nervousness, for I do not know what else to call it, of outer movement.
One would say, that Nature, like untrained persons, could not sit still
without nestling about or doing something with her limbs or features, and
that high breeding was only to be looked for in trim gardens, where the
soul of the trees is ill at ease perhaps, but their manners are
unexceptionable, and a rustling branch or leaf falling out of season is
an indecorum. The real forest is hardly still except in the Indian
summer; then there is death in the house, and they are waiting for the
sharp shrunken months to come with white raiment for the summer's burial.

There were many hemlocks in this neighborhood, the grandest and most
solemn of all the forest-trees in the mountain regions. Up to a certain
period of growth they are eminently beautif