WINTER WOODSMEN AROUND 

 BOSTON 



ALL winter long the sound of the ax 

 rings in the frozen New England woods; 

 for the ax is about the only tool of his 

 trade that the industrious farmer can use, 

 from December until April. Every morn- 

 ing you may see him driving his team 

 toward the woods, or himself plodding 

 along solitary in the sled-track, ax on shoul- 

 der, while the sun is still level with the 

 tree-tops, and the hoar-frost is gleaming like 

 diamond dust on the old rail-fence. There 

 is a certain gipsy charm about this daily 

 going to the woods and living under the 

 tent of the trees, in touch with the mys- 

 teries and the secrets of nature. The farmer 

 becomes, for the time, a woodsman, a pio- 

 neer, an adventurer, and the wild life in 

 him revives, as if it had been merely 

 drugged by more prosaic toil, and now 

 starts up at the breath of the woods, keen, 

 eager, zestful, and quick to all the sights 

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