ssocks among them, put
your pail underneath a bush, and begin. At first, the handfuls drop in
with a high-keyed "plinking" sound; then, when the "bottom is covered,"
this changes to a soft patter altogether satisfactory; and as you sit
stripping the crisp branches and letting the neat little balls roll
through your fingers, your spirit grows calm within you, you feel the
breeze, you look up now and then over stretches of hill, or pasture, or
sky, and you settle into a state of complete acquiescence in things as
they are.

For there is always a breeze, and always a view, at least where my
huckleberries grow. If any one should ask me where to find a good
situation for a house, I should answer, with a comprehensive wave of my
arm, "Oh, choose any huckleberry patch." Only 'twere pity to demolish so
excellent a thing as a huckleberry patch, merely to erect so doubtful a
thing as a house.

I know one such--a royal one even among huckleberry patches. To get to
it you go up an old road,--up, and up, and up,--you pass big fields,
newmown and wide open to the sky, you get broader and broader outlooks
over green woodland and blue rolling hills, with a bit of azure river in
the midst. You come out on great flats of rock, thinly edged with light
turf, and there before you are the "berry lots," as the natives call
them,--rolling, windy uplands, with nothing bigger than cedars and wild
cherry trees to break their sweep. The berry bushes crowd together in
thick-set patches, waist-high, interspersed with big "high-bush" shrubs
in clumps or alone, low, hoary juniper, and great, dark masses of richly
glossy, richly fragrant bay. The pointed cedars stand about like
sentinels, stiff enough save where their sensitive tops lean delicately
away from the wind. In the scant herbage between is goldenrod, the
earliest and the latest alike at home here, and red lilies and asters,
and down close to the ground, if you care to stoop for them, trailing
vines of dewberries with their fruit, the sweetest of all the
blackberries. Truly it is a goodly prospect, and one to fill the heart
with satisfaction that the world is as it is.

The pleasure of huckleberrying is partly in the season--the late
summer-time, from mid-July to September. The poignant joys of early
spring are passed, and the exuberance of early summer, while the keen
stimulus of fall has not yet come. Things are at poise. The haying is
over, the meadows, shorn of their rich grass, lie taw