ldered in there alone, and in old times
folks had been lost. I expect there was considerable fear left over
from the old Indian times, and the poor days o' witchcraft; anyway, I
've seen bold men act kind o' timid. Some women o' the Asa Bowden
family went out one afternoon berryin' when I was a girl, and got lost
and was out all night; they found 'em middle o' the mornin' next day,
not half a mile from home, scared most to death, an' sayin' they'd
heard wolves and other beasts sufficient for a caravan. Poor
creatur's! they 'd strayed at last into a kind of low place amongst
some alders, an' one of 'em was so overset she never got over it, an'
went off in a sort o' slow decline. 'T was like them victims that
drowns in a foot o' water; but their minds did suffer dreadful. Some
folks is born afraid of the woods and all wild places, but I must say
they 've always been like home to me."

I glanced at the resolute, confident face of my companion. Life was
very strong in her, as if some force of Nature were personified in this
simple-hearted woman and gave her cousinship to the ancient deities.
She might have walked the primeval fields of Sicily; her strong gingham
skirts might at that very moment bend the slender stalks of asphodel
and be fragrant with trodden thyme, instead of the brown wind-brushed
grass of New England and frost-bitten goldenrod. She was a great soul,
was Mrs. Todd, and I her humble follower, as we went our way to visit
the Queen's Twin, leaving the bright view of the sea behind us, and
descending to a lower country-side through the dry pastures and fields.

The farms all wore a look of gathering age, though the settlement was,
after all, so young. The fences were already fragile, and it seemed as
if the first impulse of agriculture had soon spent itself without hope
of renewal. The better houses were always those that had some hold
upon the riches of the sea; a house that could not harbor a
fishing-boat in some neighboring inlet was far from being sure of
every-day comforts. The land alone was not enough to live upon in that
stony region; it belonged by right to the forest, and to the forest it
fast returned. From the top of the hill where we had been sitting we
had seen prosperity in the dim distance, where the land was good and
the sun shone upon fat barns, and where warm-looking houses with three
or four chimneys apiece stood high on their solid ridge above the bay.

As we drew nearer to Mr