162 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



brook is visible, a snake-like indentation in the green of 

 the meadow. The cart tracks of the hay road lead back 

 from the bridge to the great barn, and forward into the 

 sunny reaches of the fields, or even farther into the tim- 

 ber. The verdant intervale is ringed with hills, near and 

 wooded, far off and blue. The grasshoppers leap 

 in a tiny cloud about your feet as you walk, the crick- 

 ets chirrup, and the bobolinks and larks are busy in the 

 air. Perhaps from the distance comes the steady 

 click, click, click of a mowing machine, hottest of summer 

 sounds. For many years when I was pent in a city ten 

 months of the year, just such a bridge was always in 

 my dreams, a bridge that lets the sugar grove brook pass 

 under on its way to the brown Ham Branch and invites 

 your eye to wander up the valley to the blue nobility of 

 Moosilauke, most beautiful of mountains. 



Scarcely less to be desired is the little foot-bridge 

 which crosses the brook farther up, where it still tum- 

 bles and talks amid the trees. The path is a way of 

 dead leaves and dark mould and wild flowers, cloistered 

 amid great tree trunks. But from the tiny bridge a 

 vista suddenly opens. The brook has cleared a sight- 

 line down the slope through the forest, and you glimpse 

 unexpectedly the green meadows out there in the sun, 

 turning from emerald to gold as the sun sets, and the 

 songs of the hermit thrushes throb in the cool dimness 

 about you. 



Less artless and simple than the little bridges of 



