en lady who wrote
obituary verses on the death of her pious friends.

The berry season lasted several weeks, and toward its close prudent
housewives dried some for winter use or preserved them in molasses. The
last we gathered were the swamp, or high-bush blueberries. These had a
sub-acid, delicious flavor, not unlike the smell of the swamp pink, which
grew in the same spot. The black raspberry, which we called thimble
berry, was found along the stone walls, but was not abundant. I knew a
few bushes and kept it secret, for if I found a saucerful I was sure of
a small pie baked by my mother, and all my own. If I could not find
enough for a pie I strung such as I gathered on long spears of grass. As
they were shaped like little thimbles, I fitted them on the grass stems
one over the other like a nest of cups, reversing them at intervals, to
make a pattern, which showed the young savage, generally intent only on
something to eat or to play with, to have a slight artistic instinct. As
I now recall those strings of thimble berries, I think they would make
an humble ornamental border to a picture of a New England roadside with
its crooked and tumbled stone walls. No road to me is attractive that is
not bounded by such walls and fringed with berry bushes, brush and wild
apple trees, from among which peer forth the cymes of the wayfaring bush
and sweet scented clusters of the traveller's joy. Let England have her
trim, hawthorne lanes and pleached gardens of fruit and flower, and
Italy her olive and orange; for me the New England wilding roadside,
interrupted only now and then by a farmhouse and littered yard, is
dearer.

I have not yet mentioned other berries that used to make a country boy's
life so full of interest. There was the cranberry, not yet exploited by
cultivation and proprietorship. In Bellingham the cranberry meadows were
still wild and free. The farmer who claimed an exclusive right to them
had no standing in the community and was universally denounced as mean
and stingy. No one wanted many, as they were not bought at country
stores, and, required as much sugar in the cooking as there were
berries; so cranberry sauce was a luxury rarely indulged. Like most wild
fruits they were never picked clean. When the spring thaws flooded the
meadows and washed them in windrows on the shore we gathered them to eat
raw and also for paint. Having been frozen and a little sweetened in
their winter and watery wanderings, we fou