12 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



pine upon the borders, overrun with the hosts of the 

 shrubby cinquefoil, most provocative of plants because 

 it refuses to blossom unanimously, putting forth its 

 yellow flowers a few at a time here and there on the 

 sturdy bush. Such a pasture I know upon a hilltop 

 eighteen hundred feet above the sea, where now few 

 cattle browse, and seldom enough save at blueberry 

 season does a human foot pass through the rotted bars 

 or straddle the tumbling, lichen-covered stone wall, 

 where sentinel mulleins guard the gaps. It is not easy 

 now even to reach this pasture, for the old logging roads 

 are choked and the cattle tracks, eroded deep into the 

 soil like dry irrigation ditches, sometimes plunge through 

 tangles of hemlock, crossing and criss-crossing to reach 

 little green lawns where long ago the huts of charcoal- 

 burners stood, and only at the very summit converging 

 into parallels that are plain to follow. Some of them, 

 too, will lead you far astray, to a rocky shoulder of the 

 hill guarded by cedars, where you will suddenly view the 

 true pasture a mile away, over a ravine of forest. Yet 

 once you have reached the true summit pasture, there 

 bursts upon you a prospect the Lake country of Eng- 

 land cannot excel; here the northbound Peabodies rest 

 in May to tune their voices for their mating song, here 

 the everlasting flower sheds its subtle perfume on the 

 upland air, the sweet fern contends in fragrance, and 

 here the world is all below you with naught above but 

 Omar's inverted bowl and a drifting cloud. 



