158 MY FARM. 



spruce. This tangled belt is of a spontaneous 

 growth, and has shot up upon a strip of the neg- 

 lected pasture-land, from which, seven years since, I 

 trenched the area of the garden. Thus it is not only 

 a protection, but offers a pleasant contrast of what 

 the whole field might have been, with what the gar- 

 den now is. I must confess that I love these savage 

 waymarks of progressive tillage as I love to meet 

 here and there, some stolid old-time thinker, whom 

 the rush of modern ideas has left in picturesque 

 isolation. 



Time and again some enterprising gardener has 

 begged the privilege of uprooting this strip of wild- 

 ness, and trenching to the skirt of the wall beyond 

 it ; but I have guarded the waste as if it were a 

 crop ; the cheewits and thrushes make their nests 

 undisturbed there. The long, firm gravel-alley which 

 traverses the garden from north to south, traverses 

 also this bit of savage shrubbery, and by a latticed 

 gate, opens upon smooth grass-lands beyond, which 

 are skirted with forest. 



Within this tangle-wood, I have set a few graft- 

 Ungs upon a wild-crab, and planted a peach or two 

 only to watch the struggle which these artificial 

 people will make with their wild neighbors. And 

 so various is the growth within this limited belt, that 

 my children pick there, in their seasons, luscious 



