MYETERY OF AN ABANDONED ORCHARD 



41 



brought the seeds here originally, or perhaps the 

 Belamcanda, an East Indian name of the species, has 

 outlived every vestige of some old Dutch cottage garden 

 that once, bloomed in this ancient orchard of Grassy 

 Sprain. 



All through the tangle of wild appletrees, young 

 thorny locusts, cockspur thorns, and dense clumps of 

 pink azalea and candleberry bushes are fine big sassafras 

 trees. There are large black-heart cherry trees that 

 seem to have gone wild in this locality but bear wonder- 

 fully in season. Clambering among the tops of the twenty- 

 foot locusts are masses of black frost grapes which the 

 birds come twice a day from the woods to feast on, 

 even in these thawing mid-winter days. There is still 

 so much to eat in mid-winter in the forests that I have 

 wondered whether a naturalist would starve, if he had 

 a hatchet, trowel and pocketknife with him. There are 

 paths wandering among the candleberry clumps the bay- 

 berry, two or three of whose leaves thrown into a soup 

 certainly improve the flavor, and whose waxen berries, 

 ash-gray, our grandmothers used to gather to make into 

 candles that, burning, filled the house with such mystic 

 fragrance that to this day we like to have them at Christ- 

 mas time to remind us of the old-time romance of the 

 American Colonial Yule-tide. The paths wander here 

 and there among the appletrees and junipers Gypsy 

 paths I think they must be, for who but the Romany 

 people are there, among the sons of men in towns, who 

 would leave their money-grubbing 

 nowadays to make them and keep 

 them worn and clean swept? Of 

 course there are the tales of the old 

 herb-gatherers about what they have 



paths of leaves and brushwood well, they somehow 

 make us sensible people nervous after sunset ! 



The forest that crowns the top of the hill and sweeps 

 down to the lake shore the Grassy Sprain reservoir 

 of the City of Yonkers is of hard wood, giant old 



seen in the 

 gloaming, in the 

 treacherous light 

 between sunset 

 and moonrise 

 when returning 

 through these 

 byways from the spearmint beds over by Grassy Sprain 

 Lake. They are always seeing things that no one else 

 sees in the forest these old herb-gatherers and their 

 tales of brownies, and wood-gnomes, sweeping the forest 



BIG SASSAFRAS TREES AMONG THE 

 TANGLE 



THE LITTLE PEOPLE SURELY MUST LIVE IN THE CHINKS 

 OF THE OLD CELLAR STONES I 



white and red oaks, lady beeches, black walnut and 

 hickories. It is a sanctuary for birds and small animals, 

 as well as for some of our most valuable timber trees. 

 There are interesting things about the forest of Grassy 

 Sprain to the botanist, though it is only a woodlot com- 

 pared with the Adirondacks, the 

 North Woods of Maine, and our 

 Western forests. In the tangled 

 underbrush of deep ravines grow 

 the showy orchid, the pepper-root, 

 maidenhair fern, moonwort, jack- 

 in-the-pulpit, white baneberry, the 

 pungent wild ginger, and many 

 other rare and beautiful denizens 

 that show that this wood, a part 

 of it at least, was never cleared. 

 We start home through the gath- 

 ering dusk, glancing curiously be- 

 tween the dead brakes and candle- 

 berry, lest we shall see but, Good 

 Gracious ! Suppose we should see ? 

 After all, why worry lest we come 

 suddenly upon a little old man 

 knee - high - to - a - grasshopper, a 

 bearded little old dwarf in a leath- 

 er jerkin and frog-skin leggins, sweeping the paths with a 

 birchen broom ? Aren't we secretly hoping that we shall 

 be startled in just such a way as a sort of climax to our 

 day of following the fleeting notes of Pan's pipes through 

 the Grassy Sprain woods ? 



"There is no rhyme that is half so sweet 

 As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat. 

 There is no meter that's half so fine 

 As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine, 

 And the loveliest lyric I ever heard 

 Was the wild-wood strain of a forest bird." 



Cawein 



IX THE CRACK OF A LEDGE THE DRIED 

 STALKS OF THE BLACKBERRY LILY 



