believe she could pick a lock.
We pass through the kindly breach and skirt the fence for some little
distance to regain the path. The fence on this side is densely plumed
with blackberry vines. What a revel I held there two months ago. The
fruit hung around in rich masses of ebony, each little atom composing
the cone having a glittering spot upon it like a tiny eye. How the
black beauties melted on my tongue in their dead-ripe richness. One
bush in particular was heavy with the clusters. After despoiling the
edges I opened the heart, and there, hidden snugly away, as if for the
wood-fairies, were quantities of the sable clusters, larger and more
splendid than any I had seen. I immediately made my way into the
defences of that fortress. There was a merciless sacking there,
reader, allow me to tell you. But that is neither "here nor there" on
the present occasion.

How beautifully the soft, tender dark light slumbers on objects where
the great roof of the forest will allow it. There is an edge of deep
golden lace gleaming upon that mound of moss, and here, the light,
breaking through the overhanging beech, has so mottled the tawny
surface of the leaves beneath as to make it appear as if a
leopard-skin had been dropped there.

B-o-o-m, b-o-o-m, boom-boom--whi-r-r-r-r-r--there sounds the drum of
the partridge. We'll rouse his speckled lordship probably below,
causing him to give his low, quick thunder-clap so as to send the
heart on a leaping visit to the throat.

We now descend the ridge upon which we have been for some time, to a
glade at the foot. The sweet haze belonging to the season is
shimmering over it. It is a broad space surrounded on all sides by the
forest. The first settler in this part of the country had "located"
himself here, and this was his little clearing. His hut stood on an
eminence in one corner. He lived there a number of years. He was a
reserved, unsocial man, making the forest his only haunt, and his
rifle his only companion. He was at last found dead in his cabin.
Alone and unattended he had died, keeping to the last aloof from human
society. The hut was next occupied by a singular couple--an old man
and his idiot son. The father was of a fierce, savage temper, but
seemed very fond, although capriciously so, of his child. Sometimes he
would treat him with the greatest tenderness, then again, at some
wayward action of the idiot, he would burst upon him with an awful
explosion of passion. The ol