he progress of teams over it is slow, but there is
such joy of wildness in the solitudes it penetrates that; if the horses
had any gait slower than a walk, one might still wish to stay them. It
is a Northern forest, with the air of having sprang quickly up in the
fierce heat and haste of the Northern summers. The small firs are set
almost as dense as rye in a field, and in their struggle to the light
they have choked one another so that there is a strange blight of death
and defeat on all that vigour of life. Few of the trees have won any
lofty growth; they seem to have died and fallen when they were about
to outstrip the others in size, and from their decay a new sylvan
generation riots rankly upward. The surface of the ground is thinly
clothed with a deciduous undergrowth, above which are the bare, spare
stems of the evergreens, and then their limbs thrusting into one another
in a sombre tangle, with locks of long yellowish-white moss, like the
grey pendants of the Southern pines, dripping from them and draining
their brief life.

In such a place you must surrender yourself to its influences,
profoundly yet vaguely melancholy, or you must resist them with whatever
gaiety is in you, or may be conjured out of others. It was conceded
that Mavering was the life of the party, as the phrase goes. His
light-heartedness, as kindly and sympathetic as it was inexhaustible,
served to carry them over the worst places in the road of itself. He
jumped down and ran back, when he had passed a bad bit, to see if the
others were getting through safely; the least interesting of the party
had some proof of his impartial friendliness; he promised an early and
triumphant emergence from all difficulties; he started singing, and
sacrificed himself in several tunes, for he could not sing well; his
laugh seemed to be always coming back to Alice, where she rode late
in the little procession; several times, with the deference which he
delicately qualified for her, he came himself to see if he could not do
something for her.

"Miss Pasmer," croaked her friend Miss Anderson, who always began in
that ceremonious way with her, and got to calling her Alice further
along in the conversation, "if you don't drop something for that poor
fellow to run back two or three miles and get, pretty soon, I'll do it
myself. It's peyfectly disheaytening to see his disappointment when you
tell him theye's nothing to be done."

"He seems to get over it," said Alic