H7 



and still. If they drain grass or woodland, 

 and come out under fifty feet of rock, they 

 will be cool and sweet as moonlight over 

 snow. Here is the Fox Spring par excellence. 

 It gathers in the big South Wood, whose 

 edge you see fringing the top of the bluff. 



The bluff faces north a sheer wall of 

 blue limestone, seamed and broken into 

 huge ledges. In the cleft of one a young 

 hickory has got root, and springs straight 

 and tall six feet beyond the top. All man- 

 ner of wild vines grow in other clefts grape 

 vines, wild ivy, poison-oak, trail down almost 

 into the water. The glory of it, though, is 

 its ferns. The trailing rock-fern runs all 

 over the face of it ; each seam and cleft 

 is a thick fringe of maidenhair, knee-high 

 wherever it gets good root. At the foot it 

 springs into a veritable fairy forest, gemmed 

 here and there with the coral of Indian tur- 

 nip and Solomon's seal. 



All the rocks about the spring that sun- 

 shine never touches are beset with lichens 

 and liverworts, green and gray. Twenty 

 feet away, in a mass of mould that was once 

 a fallen tree, is a blackberry clump, bent to 

 earth with rich fruit. Eat your fill of it, and 

 carry home a good few. What if you have 

 no basket? Berries like these grow only 



