THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 93 



the barns lay the farm itself scores of 

 acres, chiefly rocks and huckleberry bushes, 

 with thistles and mullein and sumac. There 

 were dry, warm slopes, where the birches 

 grew; not the queenly paper birch of the 

 North, but the girlish little gray birch with its 

 veil of twinkling leaves and its glimmer of 

 slender stems. There were rugged ledges, 

 deep-shadowed with oak and chestnut; there 

 were hot, open hillsides thick-set with cat- 

 brier and blackberry canes, where one could 

 never go without setting a brown rabbit 

 scampering. It was a delectable farm, but 

 not, in the ordinary sense, highly productive, 

 and its appeal was rather to the contempla 

 tive than to the practical mind. 



Jonathan was from the first infected with 

 the desire of making the farm more productive 

 in the ordinary sense; and one day, when I 

 wandered up to a distant corner, oh, dismay! 

 There was a slope of twinkling birches 

 no longer twinkling prone! Cut, dragged, 

 and piled up in masses of white stems and 

 limp green leafage and tangled red-brown 

 twigs ! It was a sorry sight. I walked about 

 it much, perhaps, as my white hens had walked 



