or two in the history of these pastures before they have arrived
at the dignity of being called woodland, and yet are too much shaded
and overgrown by young trees to give proper pasturage, when they made
delightful harbors for the small wild creatures which yet remain, and
for wild flowers and berries. Here you send an astonished rabbit
scurrying to his burrow, and there you startle yourself with a
partridge, who seems to get the best of the encounter. Sometimes you
see a hen partridge and her brood of chickens crossing your path with
an air of comfortable door-yard security. As you drive along the
narrow, grassy road, you see many charming sights and delightful nooks
on either hand, where the young trees spring out of a close-cropped
turf that carpets the ground like velvet. Toward the east and the
quaint fishing village of Ogunquit, I find the most delightful
woodland roads. There is little left of the large timber which once
filled the region, but much young growth, and there are hundreds of
acres of cleared land and pasture-ground where the forests are
springing fast and covering the country once more, as if they had no
idea of losing in their war with civilization and the intruding white
settler. The pine woods and the Indians seem to be next of kin, and
the former owners of this corner of New England are the only proper
figures to paint into such landscapes. The twilight under tall pines
seems to be untenanted and to lack something, at first sight, as if
one opened the door of an empty house. A farmer passing through with
his axe is but an intruder, and children straying home from school
give one a feeling of solicitude at their unprotectedness. The pine
woods are the red man's house, and it may be hazardous even yet for
the gray farmhouses to stand so near the eaves of the forest. I have
noticed a distrust of the deep woods, among elderly people, which was
something more than a fear of losing their way. It was a feeling of
defenselessness against some unrecognized but malicious influence.

Driving through the long woodland way, shaded and chilly when you are
out of the sun; across the Great Works River and its pretty elm-grown
intervale; across the short bridges of brown brooks; delayed now and
then by the sight of ripe strawberries in sunny spots by the roadside,
one comes to a higher open country, where farm joins farm, and the
cleared fields lie all along the highway, while the woods are pushed
back a good di