1 86 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



to be an hundred ; and never lost his eye-sight, nor used 

 spectacles. He got on horseback without help ; and rode to 

 the death of the stag, till he was past fourscore." 



That, gentlemen, certainly smacks of the chase ! 

 And, with the type set in the old-time f-shaped s's, as in 

 the first edition, the effect of this passage is greatly in- 

 creased. What a singular character he was; a sports- 

 man. Epicurean to the core, and yet temperate, and 

 observing the laws of the Church, even though he did 

 keep "a great apple-pye" in the pulpit; and how he 

 loved and enjoyed the things of the wild! I think I 

 should have liked to know him. 



Thoreau's "Walden; or, Life in the Woods" — one 

 must not pass that by, nor "The Maine Woods," nor 

 the many other chance descriptions of the forest from 

 the pen of that strange, wild lover of the woods. Nor 

 should we forget some of the pages in Whitman's 

 "Specimen Days;" nor the forest poems of Longfellow, 

 Emerson, and Bryant; nor the forest scenes in the 

 "Scarlet Letter;" nor, in England, the work of Scott, 

 Ruskin, Richard Jefferies, and Mr. George Meredith. 

 Wilson Flagg has written an interesting account of the 

 intensity of his boyhood impressions upon first entering 

 a virgin forest, how he watched the scenes as he rode 

 through them — "the immense pillars that rose out of 

 a level plain, strewed with brown foliage, and inter- 

 spersed with a few branches and straggling vines; the 

 dark summits of the white pines that rose above the 

 round heads of the other species which were the pre- 

 vailing timber; the twilight that pervaded the woods 

 even at high noon; and I thought of their seemingly 

 boundless extent, of their mysterious solitude, and their 



