AT LINDEN BEND. 17 



jnammal, bird, or bee. The prying sunshine gives up 

 their secret. Here, then, it was that many a creature 

 looked out at me and laughed, while I stood wondering 

 where they might be hidden. 



To be sure, a dead tree is an uncanny prophet. It 

 bids me look to the future ; but, surrounded by the 

 sights and sounds of untamed nature, my pulses shall 

 beat no less firmly because they cannot beat forever. I 

 can gather buttercups and chase butterflies in a grave- 

 yard without stopping to read hie jacet upon every 

 tombstone. This world is too full of offerings to quit 

 work and wonder if the next is even fuller. I once 

 gathered a fern, a sprouted acorn, and a bluet from Tho- 

 reau's grave, without wondering, at the time, if he were 

 then gathering greener growths on the pleasant hill-sides 

 of another world. 



Wherever I chance to be, give me living, stately 

 trees — trees that peeped through the sod and saw the 

 sunrise of an earlier century. Among them, and among 

 them only, can I be alone ; man's handiwork, here, has 

 marred all other scenes ; and the ocean and the prairie 

 are beyond my reach. 



This weedy, bush-grown, long-neglected pasture, which 

 gave evidence of nothing but a most prosaic history, still 

 contains the evidences of stirring scenes enacted here 

 less than a century ago; and long ages prior to that, 

 this same lonely pasture was the site of an Indian vil- 

 lage. 



The only victims, among the residents of this valley, 

 of the yellow-fever epidemic of 1793, died in a small 



