esome-looking road running into the woods all by itself, with a
guide-board marked "Turkey Hill." Why not accept the pleasing
invitation, which seemed meant on purpose for just such an idle
pedestrian as myself? As for Turkey Hill, I had never heard of it, and
presumed it to be some uninteresting outlying hamlet. My concern, as a
saunterer's ought always to be, was with the road itself, not with what
might lie at the end of it. I did not discover my mistake till I had
gone half a mile, more or less, when the road all at once turned sharply
to the right and commenced ascending. Then it dawned upon me that Turkey
Hill must be no other than the long, gradual, grassy slope at which I
had already been looking from the railway station. The prospect of sea
and land was beautiful; all the more so, perhaps, because of a thick
autumnal haze. It might be called excellent Christmas weather, I said to
myself, when a naturally prudent man, no longer young, could sit perched
upon a fence rail at the top of a hill, drinking in the beauties of the
landscape.

At the station, after my descent, I met a young man of the neighborhood.
"Do you know why they call that Turkey Hill?" said I. "No, sir, I
don't," he answered. I suggested that probably somebody had killed a
wild turkey up there at some time or other. He looked politely
incredulous. "I don't _think_ there are any wild turkeys up there," said
he; "_I_ never saw any." He was not more than twenty-five years old, and
the last Massachusetts turkey was killed on Mount Tom in 1847, so that I
had no doubt he spoke the truth. Probably he took me for a simple-minded
fellow, while I thought nothing worse of him than that he was one of
those people, so numerous and at the same time so much to be pitied, who
have never studied ornithology.

The 25th was warmer even than the 24th; and it, likewise, I spent upon
the South Shore, though at a point somewhat farther inland, and in a
town where I was not likely to lose myself, least of all in any
out-of-the-way woodland road. In short, I spent Christmas on my native
heath,--a not inappropriate word, by the bye, for a region so largely
grown up to huckleberry bushes. "Holbrook's meadows," and "Norton
pasture!"--the names are not to be found on any map, and will convey no
meaning to my readers; but in my ears they awaken memories of many and
many a sunny hour. On this holiday I revisited them both. Warm as it
was, boys and girls were skating on the me