Clearing 227 



walnut grows, the Virginia creeper mantles it 

 from root to tip, in a rippling vesture of liv- 

 ing green. In September when the walnut 

 turns yellow, and the creeper bright crimson, 

 a tree so clothed looks to have come from 

 fairyland. All outside there is the flittery 

 yellow ; all underneath, a spectral tree-skeleton 

 of glowing crimson. 



Something else glowed there, even more 

 eerily, upon damp nights of summer and fall. 

 The dead trees had turned to fox-fire. Fox- 

 fire is the pale, peculiar phosphorescence 

 evolved from slowly rotting wood. It showed 

 in lines and blurs and blotches all under the 

 thickets, where a tree-trunk lay half imbedded 

 in the black soil. If sunshine was let in upon 

 the mouldering wood, it dried to a brown 

 crumbling tinder, which the countryside folk 

 called spunk, or punk. True Tennessee punk 

 is a dried toadstool, but the brown wood had 

 most of its properties, catching fire if the least 

 spark fell upon it, and smouldering in and in 

 till the heart was a red glowing ember. Back 

 in pioneer days it was almost as essential to keep 

 your punk dry as your powder. Fires were 

 kindled by striking sparks over it. Hunters 

 struck the sparks with the flint locks of their 

 rifles, snapping the unloaded weapons over 

 the punk. When a household lost seed-fire, 

 if there was no neighbor close enough to make 



