DECEMBER OUT-OF-DOORS. 59 
that had blossomed freely in the summer. 
The house has been gone for these thirty 
years or more (alas! my sun must be rap- 
idly declining when memory casts so long 
a shadow), but the bushes seem likely to 
hold their own for at least a century. They 
might have prompted a wise man to some 
wise reflections; but for myself, it must be 
acknowledged, I fell instead to thinking how 
many half days I had fished —and caught 
nothing, or next to nothing —along this 
same pleasant, willow-bordered shore. 
In Norton pasture, an hour or two later, 
I made myself young again by putting a few 
checkerberries into my mouth; and in a 
small new clearing just over the brook 
(“Dyer’s Run,” this used to be called, but 
I fear the name is falling into forgetfulness) 
I stumbled upon a patch of some handsome 
evergreen shrub, which I saw at once to be 
a novelty. I took it for a member of the 
heath family, but it proved to belong with 
the hollies, — Zlew glabra, or ink-berry, a 
plant not to be found in the county where it 
is my present lot to botanize. So, even on 
lowed a pronunciation “traditional in many old English 
families.” 
