the countryside that bounded them. It was a pleasant country
indeed, their own New England: their petty thoughts and vain
imaginings seemed futile and unrelated to so fair a scene of things.
But the figure of a man who was crossing the meadow below looked like
a malicious black insect. It was an old man, it was Enoch Holt; time
had worn and bent him enough to have satisfied his bitterest foe. The
women could see his empty coat-sleeve flutter as he walked slowly and
unexpectantly in that glorious evening light.

THE WHITE ROSE ROAD.

Being a New Englander, it is natural that I should first speak about
the weather. Only the middle of June, the green fields, and blue sky,
and bright sun, with a touch of northern mountain wind blowing
straight toward the sea, could make such a day, and that is all one
can say about it. We were driving seaward through a part of the
country which has been least changed in the last thirty years,--among
farms which have been won from swampy lowland, and rocky,
stamp-buttressed hillsides: where the forests wall in the fields, and
send their outposts year by year farther into the pastures. There is a
year 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