ent which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first
season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to
look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from
dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by
magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and
sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax
their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like
a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken
off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which,
when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their
bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and
broke the tender limbs.

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my
clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart
my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house,
gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the
pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door
and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of
the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I
have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving
like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the
country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I
hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long
ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. He
had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all
gone off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt if there is
such a place in Massachusetts now:--

"In truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is--Concord."

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of
where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am,
as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight
trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old
acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an
employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in
the orbit of the earth.

The whistle