68 Next to the Ground 



the month when woody things die almost at a 

 touch. The stroke of an ax, a wheel jolting 

 roughly over an exposed root, the wrenching 

 of a branch, or a slight wound to the bark 

 may be fatal then to the tallest, sturdiest oak. 

 Greenly alive to-day, to-morrow it may be 

 withered to the tip, and next week dry and 

 dead. Yet lightning scathe is not so deadly 

 as in early spring, though if the lightning 

 shatters the tree, particularly an oak tree, it 

 often makes the wood more durable than even 

 felling. Slivers of it stay sound and keep 

 shape, after whole trunks, cut and left on the 

 ground, have rotted and crumbled. 



Old man Shack, who rented a place in the 

 flat woods, claimed to know by the moon just 

 when this time of danger came round. If 

 Major Baker did not fully credit the claim, he 

 was too wise in the unwrit ways of wind and 

 weather, and life, and growth, to scout it al- 

 together. So he took advice of the old man 

 before setting men at work in the bush pas- 

 ture — fifty acres of tangle he had bought only 

 the fall before. He had wanted it all the years 

 it had lain waste, but the title had been clouded 

 with a suit in chancery. When the suit ended 

 in a decree of partition, he snapped up the 

 field, although to get it he had to take also a 

 hundred acres in the flat woods, for which he 

 did not greatly care. 



