A NEW ENGLAND WOODPILE 



birches, yet in the smooth skin of their 

 prime, which is fit to be fashioned into 

 drinking cups and berry baskets, or to 

 furnish a page for my lady's album. Here 

 are hardbacks, some with grain winding 

 like the grooves of a rifle. This is the 

 timber the Indians made their bows of, 

 and which now serves the same purpose 

 for the young savages whom we have 

 always with us. There are sinewy blue 

 beeches, slowly grown up from ox-goads 

 and the " beech seals " of Ethan Allen's 

 Green Mountain Boys to the girth of a 

 man's thigh, a size at which they mostly 

 stop growing. A smaller trunk, like yet 

 unlike them, sets folks to guessing what 

 kind of wood it is. He will hit the mark 

 who fires at random the names " shad- 

 blow," " service - berry," or " amelan- 

 chier." If the axe had been merciful, in 

 early May its branches would have been 

 as white with blossoms as if the last April 

 snow still clung to them. Tossed on 

 a-top of all is a jumbled thatch of small 

 stuff, — saplings improvidently cut, short- 

 lived striped maple, and dogwood, the 

 slender topmost lengths of great trees, 

 once the perches of hawks and crows, 

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