slowly down and
float until they sink into the leaf mould beneath. I have favorite paths
through it as the squirrels have in the tree-tops; I know where the mud
is too deep to venture, where the sprawling, moss-covered roots of the
maples offer grateful support; I know the brushy edges where the
blossoming witch-hazel fills the air with its quaint fragrance; I know
the sunny, open places where the tufted ferns, shoulder high, and tawny
gold after the early frosts, give insecure but welcome footing; I
know--too well indeed--the thickets of black alder that close in about
me and tug at my gun and drive me to fury.

Yes, we know that swamp, and other swamps only less well. We know the
rock ledges, the big dry woods of oak and chestnut and maple and beech.
We know the ravines where the great hemlocks keep the air always dim and
still, and one goes silent-footed over the needle floor. We grow
familiar, too, with all the little things about the country. We discover
new haunts of the fringed gentian, the wonderful, the capricious, with
its unbelievable blue that one sees nowhere else save under the black
lashes of some Irish eyes. We find the shy spring orchids, gone to seed
now, but we remember and seek them out again next May. We surprise the
spring flowers in their rare fall blossoming--violets white and blue in
the warm, moist bottom-lands, sand violets on the dry knolls, daisies,
hepaticas, buttercups, and anemones-- I have seen all these in a single
day in raw November. We learn where the biggest chestnuts grow--great
silky brown fellows almost twice the size of Jonathan's thumb. We
discover old landmarks in the deep woods, surveyors' posts, a heap of
stones carefully piled on a big rock. We find old clearings, overgrown
now, but our feet still feel underneath the weeds the furrows left by
the plow. Now and then we come upon a spot where once there must have
been a home. There is no house, no timbers even, but the stone cellar is
not wholly obliterated, and the gnarled lilac-bush and the apple tree
stubbornly cling to a worn-out life amidst the forest of young white
oaks and chestnuts that has closed in about them. Once we came upon a
little group of gravestones, only three or four, sunken in the ground
and so overgrown and weather-worn that we could read nothing. There was
no sign of a human habitation, but I suppose they must have been placed
there in the old days when the family burial-ground was in one corner
of the