SUMMER. 71 



bars under an old butternut-tree mark the place. The carriage is backed 

 to the side of the road, and the horse turned loose in the rocky meadow. 

 This is Joab Nichols's " pasture lot," with fodder consisting principally of 

 huge boulders, hardhack, and spleenwort ; to be sure, with a stray relish 

 of " butter-and-eggs " here and there, and a thousand white saucers of wild 

 carrot handy to go with them. One or two trips across the field bring all 

 our luggage, and we are soon enjoying cool comfort in the hemlock shade 

 of a fairy grotto. Above us the babbling brook bounds and splashes over 

 mossy rocks, disappearing in a mass of creamy foam, from under which it 

 eddies toward us only to plunge twenty feet into a miniature canon be- 

 low. Again, yonder it bubbles into a whirling pool, where the bordering 

 ferns bend and nod above its buoyant surface ; and now gliding from view 

 beneath the tangle of drooping boughs, it disappears only to burst forth 

 once more in its merry song as it rushes over the rapids. 



" I chatter, chatter as I go, 



To join the brimming river ; 

 For men may come and men may go, 

 But I go on forever." 



Here in this wild retreat I have found my sylvan studio — shut in by 

 fringed and fragrant evergreens, enlivened by the undergrowth of feath- 

 ery fronds, and the shimmer of the beech, as the tracery of overhanging 

 boughs trembles in the gentle breeze. Day after day finds us in this little 

 paradise, and as one in luxurious hammock swings away the hours, now 

 lost in fiction, now in short repose, or perhaps with busy needle fashions 

 graceful figures in Kensington design, the canvas on the easel shows 

 a fortnight's constant care, and the palette changes to a keepsake of a 

 sunny memory — a tinted souvenir. 



For two weeks the gurgling brook sang to us in this wild retreat. As 

 evening after evening closed in upon us, the unfinished pictures were 

 stowed away in horizontal crevices between the rocks, and, with hammock 

 still swinging in the trees, we left the gloom to the hooting owl, that even- 

 ing after evening, with tremulous cry, proclaimed the twilight hour from 

 the tall hemlock overhead. Ere long the murmuring Housatonic shim- 

 mers below us in the moonlight as we hurry on our homeward way, and 

 the distant lights of Hometown are soon seen glimmering through the 

 evening mist. The old bridge now rumbles through the darkness its sig- 

 nal of our return, and the host of Draper's Inn is seen awaiting us at the 



