; to make friends with the elegant gray squirrel and the
lively red squirrel and the comical chipmunk, who were not much afraid
of this unarmed naturalist. They may have recognized their kinship to
him, for he could climb like any squirrel, and not one of them could
have clung more securely to this bough where he was swinging, rejoicing
in the strength of his lithe, compact little body. When he shouted in
pure enjoyment of life, they chattered in reply, and eyed him with a
primeval curiosity that had no fear in it. This lad in short trousers,
torn shirt, and a frayed straw hat above his mobile and cheerful face,
might be only another sort of animal, a lover like themselves of the
beech-nut and the hickory-nut.

It was a gay world up here among the tossing branches. Across the river,
on the first terrace of the hill, were weather-beaten farmhouses, amid
apple orchards and cornfields. Above these rose the wooded dome of Mount
Peak, a thousand feet above the river, and beyond that to the left
the road wound up, through the scriptural land of Bozrah, to high and
lonesome towns on a plateau stretching to unknown regions in the south.
There was no bar to the imagination in that direction. What a gracious
valley, what graceful slopes, what a mass of color bathing this lovely
summer landscape! Down from the west, through hills that crowded on
either side to divert it from its course, ran the sparkling Deerfield,
from among the springs and trout streams of the Hoosac, merrily going on
to the great Connecticut. Along the stream was the ancient highway, or
lowway, where in days before the railway came the stage-coach and the
big transport-wagons used to sway and rattle along on their adventurous
voyage from the gate of the Sea at Boston to the gate of the West at
Albany.

Below, where the river spread wide among the rocks in shallows, or
eddies in deep, dark pools, was the ancient, long, covered, wooden
bridge, striding diagonally from rock to rock on stone columns, a
dusky tunnel through the air, a passage of gloom flecked with glints of
sunlight, that struggled in crosscurrents through the interstices of
the boards, and set dancing the motes and the dust in a golden haze, a
stuffy passage with odors a century old--who does not know the pungent
smell of an old bridge?--a structure that groaned in all its big timbers
when a wagon invaded it. And then below the bridge the lad could see the
historic meadow, which was a cornfield in