MY FARM OF EDGEWOOD 



land challenge his wonder and admiration. I 

 name the scene now, because it shows a culti- 

 vation without enclosures; nothing but a tra- 

 ditional line — which some aged poplar, or scar 

 on the chalk cliff marks,— between adjoining 

 proprietors; a belt of wheat is fringed with 

 long-bearded barley; and next, the plume-like 

 tufts of the French trefoil, make a glowing 

 band of crimson. A sturdy peasant woman, 

 in wooden sabots, is gathering up a bundle of 

 the trefoil to carry to her pet cow, under the 

 lee of the stone cottage that nestles by the 

 river's bank. 



AN OLD ORCHARD 



A CERTAIN proportion of mossy, ragged or- 

 charding belongs to almost every New Eng- 

 land farm. My own, in this respect, was no 

 exception; if exceptional at all, the exception 

 lay in the fact that its orcharding was less 

 ragged and mossy than most; the trees were 

 also, many of them, grafted with sorts ap- 

 proved twenty years ago. Eight acres of a 

 somewhat gravelly declivity, were devoted to 

 this growth, of which four were in apple trees, 

 two in cherries, and two in pears. Intervals of 

 two acres each, on either side the cherries, of 

 unoccupied land, were in the old time planted 



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