The Jonathan Papers

from Ol

ed it. I scorned gardens: their carefully planned and duly tended splendors were not for me. The orchid in the deep woods or by the edge of the lonely swamp, the rare and long-sought heather in the open

ments of a ruthless civilization, or had the tide of human life drawn away from it and left it to be engulfed by the forest from which it had once been wrested, with nothing left to mark it but a gnarled old lilac tree? I have chanced upon such spots in the heart of the wood, where the lilac and the apple tree and the old ston

! Ah! it was a hedge, a box hedge! Here were the great stone steps leading up to the gate, and here the old, square capped fence-posts, once trim and white, now sunken and silver-gray. The rest of the fence was lying among the grasses and goldenrod, but the box still lived, dead at the top, its leafless branches matted into a hoary gray tangle, but springing up from below in crisp green sprays,

stone blocks of the old doorsteps, and beyond these, a ruin-gray ashes and blackened brick, two great heaps of stone where the chimneys had been, with the stone slabs that lined the fireplaces fallen together. At one end was the deep stone cellar filled now with young beeches as tall as t

y young maples, to the old rose-garden. Beyond were giant lilacs, and groups of waxberry bushes covered with the pretty white balls that children love to string; there was the old-fashioned "burning-bush," already preparing its queer, angled berries fo

outside world come faintly to this place and take on its quality of quiet,-the lowing of cows in the pastures, the shouts of men in the fields, the deep, vibrant note of the railroad train which goes singing across distances where its rattle and roar fail to penetrate. It is very still here. Even the birds are quieter, and the crickets and the katydids less boisterous. The red squirrels move warily through the tree-tops with almost a chastened air, the black-

down years ago if any one had remembered them? And on the other side is a meadow whose thick grass, waist-high, ought to have been mowed last June and gathered into some dusky, frag

to go away, and no one will remember to find me. In truth, I feel not unwilling that it should be so. Could there be a better place? "Escaped from old ga