296 MY FARM. 



ness of color for any interior rustic ornamentation, 

 which a wet day may put in hand ; the Swamp- willow 

 is the very earliest of our native shrubs, to feel the 

 heats of the March sun, and season after season, the 

 little ones bring in from its clump, its silvery strange 

 tufts of bloom, and say : " The Willow mice have 

 come, and the spring." 



N"or must I forget the Barberry, beautiful in its 

 bloom, and still more beautiful with its crimson fruit, 

 the May-flower, the Sumac, the Sweet-brier, the 

 Bilberry, with its fairy bells, and the whole race of 

 wild vines among which not least, is the luxuriant 

 Frost-grape, tossing its tendrils with forest freedom 

 from the tops of the tallest trees, and in later June 

 filling the whole air with the exquisite perfume of its 

 blossoms. 



It may seem that a great estate and wide reach 

 of land may be demanded for the aggregation of all 

 these denizens of the wood ; yet it is not so ; I have 

 all these and more than these, with room for their 

 own riotous luxuriance, in scattered groups and 

 copses, without abstracting so much as an acre from 

 the tillable surface of the land. The brambles, thick- 

 ets, and unkempt hedge-rows which half the farmers 

 of the country leave to encroach upon the fertility 

 and order of their fields, work tenfold more of harm, 

 than the coppices which I have planted on rocky de 



