104 WOODLAND IDYLS. 



fear of and enmity toward all snakes until every 

 boy and almost every man thinks he has per- 

 formed a deed of valor when he has crushed 

 with club or stone or beneath his heel the head 

 of every innocent crawling reptile that comes 

 within his ken. 



About five o'clock J. M. and his wife came 

 up the valley, she with a bucket on her arm to 

 gather wild gooseberries, he as a body guard 

 and to chat awhile with me. After drinking 

 some lemonade and resting for a few minutes 

 she was up and away to visit every gooseberry 

 bush in this part of the pasture, though she 

 overlooked the one hanging over my spring. 

 The berries are rubbed with a cloth to remove 

 the spines and are then canned to make pies in 

 winter when other fruit is scarce. 



Out of the husks of the old the new must rise. 

 I pick up the shell of a last year's cicada and 

 powdering the dry fragments fling them in the 

 face of the breeze which bears them on to new 

 resting places. The bark of the oaken stump 

 beside me has fallen in many fragments and is 

 being powdered and reduced to dust by many 

 forms of insect life as well as by the action of 

 wind and rain. From the molecules of the ci- 

 cada's husk, from the dust of the oaken bark, 

 new life will some day rise to clothe again the 

 bosom of the earth in springtime raiment green. 

 What shall yet spring from my old husk? Is 



