Where Town and Country Meet 



snowshoes in a tangled thicket, or, leaving 

 his ax, creep upon a treed partridge, and 

 perchance, by much tiresome craning of the 

 neck, get a glimpse of her sitting on a 

 hemlock limb, cunningly hugged against 

 the trunk of the tree. That mere sight of 

 the bird is as good to him as wine, and he 

 goes back to his work with a glowing heart 

 and fingers that itch for a gun. 



Every farm, no matter how near the city, 

 has, commonly, its well-husbanded wood-lot, 

 that yields each winter some harvest of 

 firewood and pleasant occupation to the 

 farmer. Within five miles of the gilded 

 dome of the Statehouse in Boston, I have 

 found woodchoppers at work, apparently as 

 remote and unspoiled by culture as in the 

 backwoods of Maine. Last year I came 

 upon a log camp in a hollow of the woods in 

 Jamaica Plain, inhabited by four men, who 

 were lumbering there, within sound of the 

 Boston clocks, and belted all about by lines 

 of electric railway. A little brook trickled 

 under a corduroy bridge in front of their 

 door, and there on a rude bench they sat, 

 in the early twilight, smoking their pipes, 



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