rest
to the romantic hillside, that the banded reptiles, which had been the
terror of the red men for nobody knows how many thousand years, were
there still, with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at the white
men's service, if they meddled with them.

The other natural features of Rockland were such as many of our pleasant
country-towns can boast of. A brook came tumbling down the mountain-side
and skirted the most thickly settled portion of the village. In the
parts of its course where it ran through the woods, the water looked
almost as brown as coffee flowing from its urn,--to say like _smoky
quartz_ would perhaps give a better idea,--but in the open plain it
sparkled over the pebbles white as a queen's diamonds. There were
huckleberry-pastures on the lower flanks of The Mountain, with plenty of
the sweet-scented bayberry mingled with the other bushes. In other
fields grew great store of high-bush blackberries. Along the road-side
were barberry-bushes, hung all over with bright red coral pendants in
autumn and far into the winter. Then there were swamps set thick with
dingy-leaved alders, where the three-leaved arum and the skunk's-cabbage
grew broad and succulent,--shelving down into black boggy pools here and
there, at the edge of which the green frog, stupidest of his tribe, sat
waiting to be victimized by boy or snapping-turtle long after the shy
and agile leopard-frog had taken the six-foot spring that plumped him
into the middle of the pool. And on the neighboring banks the
maiden-hair spread its flat disk of embroidered fronds on the wire-like
stem that glistened brown and polished as the darkest tortoise-shell,
and pale violets, cheated by the cold skies of their hues and perfume,
sunned themselves like white-cheeked invalids. Over these rose the old
forest-trees,--the maple, scarred with the wounds that had drained away
its sweet life-blood,--the beech, its smooth gray bark mottled so as to
look like the body of one of those great snakes of old that used to
frighten armies,--always the mark of lovers' knives, as in the days of
Musidora and her swain,--the yellow birch, rough as the breast of
Silenus in old marbles,--the wild cherry, its little bitter fruit lying
unheeded at its foot,--and, soaring over all, the huge, coarse-barked,
splintery-limbed, dark-mantled hemlock, in the depths of whose aerial
solitudes the crow brooded on her nest unscared, and the gray squirrel
lived unharmed till his incisors