a few of them still in good trim, but the greater number decrepit after years of buffeting by mountain storms. A phœbe sat quietly on the ridge-pole, and a chipper was singing from the orchard. What knew they of time, or of time's mutations? The house might grow old,—the house and the trees; but if the same misfortune ever befalls phœbes and sparrows, we are, fortunately, none the wiser. To human eyes they are always young and fresh, like the buttercups that bespangled the grass before me, or like the sun that shone brightly upon the tranquil scene.
Turning away from the house and the grassy field about it, I got over a stone wall into a pasture fast growing up to wood: spruces, white pines, red pines, paper birches, and larches, with a profusion of meadow-sweet sprinkled everywhere among them. A nervous flicker started at my approach, stopped for an instant to reconnoitre, and then made off in haste. A hermit thrush was singing, and the bird that is called the "preacher"—who takes no summer vacation, but holds forth in "God's first temple" for the seven days of every week—was
delivering his homily with all earnestness. He must preach, it seemed, whether men would hear or forbear. He had already announced his text, but I could not certainly make out what it was. "Here we have no continuing city," perhaps; or it might have been, "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity." It should have been one of these, or so I thought; but, as all church-goers must have observed, the connection between text and sermon is sometimes more or less recondite, and once in a while, like the doctrine of the sermon itself, requires to be taken on faith. In the present instance, indeed, as no doubt in many others, the pew was quite as likely to be at fault as the pulpit. The red-eye's eloquence was never very persuasive to my ear. Its short sentences, its tiresome upward inflections, its everlasting repetitiousness, and its sharp, querulous tone long since became to me an old story; and I have always thought that whoever dubbed this vireo the "preacher" could have had no very exalted opinion of the clergy.
I stayed not to listen, therefore, but kept on through the wood, while a purple finch
pitched a tune on one side of the path (he appeared to feel no compunctions about interrupting the red-eye's exhortation), and a squirrel sprung his rattle on the other; and presently I came to the second farm: a large clearing, bounded by the forest on all hands, but after these many years still yielding a very respectable hay-crop (so does the good that men do live after them), and with a house and barn still standing at the lower end. I reached the house just in time to escape a shower, making an enforced obeisance as I entered. It was but the ghost of a dwelling,—the door off its hinges, and no glass in the four small windows; but it had a substantial quality about it, notwithstanding, as a not very tall man was liable at any moment to be reminded should he carry himself a trifle too proudly under the big unhewn timbers. It is better to stoop than to bump your head, they seemed to be saying. Hither came no tourists but the rabbits; and they, it was plain, were not so much tourists as permanent residents. As I looked at the blank walls and door-posts, after a fortnight's experience among the mountains, I felt grateful
at the sight of boards on which Brown of Boston and Smith of Smithfield had not yet inscribed their illustrious names. I had left the city in search of rest and seclusion. For the time, in the presence of Nature herself, I would gladly have forgotten the very existence of my all-too-famous countrymen; and I rejoiced accordingly to have found one lonely spot to which their restless feet had not yet penetrated. Tall grass grew untrodden quite up to the door-sill; raspberry vines thrust their arms in at the pane-less windows; there was neither paint nor plastering; and the tiny cupboard was so bare that it set my irreverent fancy to quoting Mother Goose in the midst of my most serious moralizings.
The owner of this farm, like his neighbor, had planted an apple orchard, and his wife a patch of cinnamon roses; and, not to treat one better than another, I picked a rose here also. There is no lover of flowers but likes to have his garden noticed, and the good housewife would have been pleased, I knew, could she have seen me looking carefully for her handsomest and sweetest bud.
By this time the shower was over, and a song-sparrow was giving thanks. I might never have another opportunity to follow up an old forest path, of which I had heard vague reports as leading from this point to the railway. "It starts from the upper corner of the farm," my informant had said. To the upper corner I went, therefore, through the rank, wet grass. But I found no sign of what I was looking for, and with some heartfelt but unreportable soliloquizings, to the effect that a countryman's directions, like dreams, are always to be read backwards, I started straight down toward the lower corner, saying to myself that I ought to have had the wit to take that course in the beginning. Sure enough, the path was there, badly overgrown with bushes and young trees, but still traceable. A few rods, and I came to the brook. The bridge was mostly gone, as I had been forewarned it probably would be, but a single big log answered a foot passenger's requirements. Once across the bridge, however, I could discover no sign of a trail. But what of that? The sun was shining; I had only to keep it at my back, and I was sure to
bring up at the railroad. So I set out, and for a while traveled on bravely. Then I began to bethink myself that I was not going up-hill quite so fast as it seemed I ought to be doing. Was I really approaching the railway, after all? Or had I started in a wrong direction (being in the woods at the time), and was I heading along the mountain-side in such a course that I might walk all night, and all the while be only plunging deeper and deeper into the forest? The suggestion was not pleasurable. If I could only see the mountain! But the thick foliage put that out of the question.
After a short debate with myself I concluded to be prudent, and make my way back to the brook while I still had the sun to guide me; for I now called to mind the showeriness of the day, and the strong likelihood that the sky might at any moment be overcast. Even as things were, there was no assurance that I might not strike the brook at some distance from the bridge, and so at some distance from the trail, with no means of determining whether it was above or below me. I began my retreat, and pretty soon, luckily or unluckily,—I