196 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 



flowers in their rare fall blossoming violets 

 white and blue in the warm, moist bottom 

 lands, sand violets on the dry knolls, daisies, 

 hepaticas, buttercups, and anemones I 

 have seen all these in a single day in raw 

 November. We learn where the biggest chest 

 nuts grow great silky brown fellows almost 

 twice the size of Jonathan s thumb. We dis 

 cover old landmarks in the deep woods, sur 

 veyors posts, a heap of stones carefully piled 

 on a big rock. We find old clearings, over 

 grown now, but our feet still feel underneath 

 the weeds the furrows left by the plow. Now 

 and then we come upon a spot where once 

 there must have been a home. There is no 

 house, no timbers even, but the stone cellar is 

 not wholly obliterated, and the gnarled lilac- 

 bush and the apple tree stubbornly cling to a 

 worn-out life amidst the forest of young white 

 oaks and chestnuts that has closed in about 

 them. Once we came upon a little group of 

 gravestones, only three or four, sunken in the 

 ground and so overgrown and weather-worn 

 that we could read nothing. There was no 

 sign of a human habitation, but I suppose 

 they must have been placed there in the old 



