THE WOODS. 



'*This is the forest primeval." 



— Longfellow, 



A MOSSy LOG 



HE greater part of the woods stood, origi- 

 nally, back of the barn. There the trees 

 had reared their massive stems for cen- 

 turies upon the knolls and along the 

 brooks ; useful to the pioneer, in his day, 

 and much more valuable, those that have 

 come down still standing, to later genera- 

 tions. Stumps can occasionally yet be 

 seen where the old trees were; and what 

 little of the vast tract is now remaining is 

 one of the last bits left of the magnificent 

 primeval forest of virgin timber which once covered 

 all these hills. 



The barn was new then, and its great beams and 

 rafters were hewn by the broadax in the very woods 

 which sheltered it, and from trees cut, in those early 

 times, freely, to make clearings — the straightest and 

 finest trunks being selected for the buildings, and the 

 others rolled and piled together, logs and branches, and 

 burned, to open up the forest for the fields of wheat. 

 So it happens that the houses and barns erected then 

 have in them the most durable of lumber — oak, black 

 walnut, hard maple, hickory — as commonly as now we 

 find the pine, and outlasting, for that reason, the more 

 recent edifices. 



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