132 Reflections. 



on the hill-side, or that the blackhaw berries are a little 

 more shrivelled than they were a month ago. When the 

 ban of Boreas is o'er the land, and the leaves huddle to- 

 gether in the depressions in the woods, as if they would 

 keep one another warm, and the snow lies on the earth, 

 then a view of one field, of one hill-side, is so similar to the 

 view a month hence, that one falls back on the calendar, 

 for the want of any change betokening the march of time 

 out of doors. 



Nature does indeed will us strange fortunes, but gen- 

 erally she is tolerably kind, and if we do not try to visit 

 the North Pole, or spend a Summer in the Sahara, we 

 may live along without any marked break in our mutual, 

 friendly relations. We may go musing calmly in the 

 meadows, in the woodland, and along the country lanes, 

 and hark to those inward murmurings of fancy that cause 

 a strange array of natural and human transactions, to move 

 in turn over old Staten Island, that seems to sleep so 

 peacefully to-day beneath the autumn sun. Yet no doubt 

 the present is quite as unquiet and wrangling as many a 

 bygone year, but over the past there always rests a halo, 

 and time, like a kind critic, idealizes for us the jumbled 

 maze, and only gives forth a poetic tincture of the whole. 



The patroons and their Bouwries, the Peach war, the 

 British troops quartered on the Island, and the domestic 

 scenes in the Dutch and Huguenot families, wear to us a 

 garment of quiet and pleasing interest, though its seams 

 chafed harshly enough, many of those who wore it of old. 



