144 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



humble peanut. Now and then, at the back of the 

 fields, we saw a gray negro cabin, seemingly as old and 

 artless, and surely as virgin of paint, as the fence itself; 

 and always at the far edge of the fields, paralleling our 

 road, marched a long procession of southern pines, their 

 tops as level as the sky line of a Paris boulevard, the 

 daggers of the pink sunset between their trunks. Ever 

 the swamp, gloomy and darkening with the coming 

 night, was on our left, but westward the old rail fence 

 accompanied us, and the friendly cabins against the 

 pines; and in the gathering twilight we heard from far 

 off the sound of a negro singing. 



The roadside wall or fence, too, besides its landscape 

 charm and friendliness, is interesting as the highway of 

 the lesser travellers. Man is the vagabond of the 

 wheel ruts; the squirrel takes the wall or the topmost 

 rail. The birds, too, in their migrations, like to rest 

 upon this rail, or even to dwell near it in preference to 

 the seemingly safer fields and woods. Just as you will 

 see the telegraph wires lined with swallows on the ap- 

 proaches leading into a city, you will find innumerable 

 birds along the country track in the trees and bushes or 

 even on the wall or fence itself. They seem to feel the 

 vagabondage of the open road, even though they have 

 all the heavens for their highway. 



Nearly every New Englander's father or grandfather 

 (or so the family legends run) once laid a barbed-wire 

 fence on posts made of willow, and hence the pollards by 



