and their stature abates with the passage of years The tilled lands 
grow thirsty and drink like a sweaty harvester, and so exhaust the foun- 
tains which used to flow into the rivers. The gains of our largest civili- 
zation are touched with loss. Many of the pines have been taken, only 
a few are left to tell survivors of another era, what sort of day was 
theirs. At this point on the St. Croix, the banks are tall so as to leap 
to the dignity of hills. There is no room for tillage near the river's bed, 
and so the dusty road and the cottage, where love leans above its cradle, 
and the woods with their hidden tinkle of cow bell and a mill, where 
crystal waters of a boisterous brook turn the wheel, as if such labor were 
a jest—these are my fellow-citizens at the falls of St. Croix. 
Here the river runs from north to south, with barely a quiver of the 
compass, only curving a little, as streams must. The valley dims upon 
the eye, at either extreme hid in a cloud of trees, southward, northward. 
The backlands stand somberly in the distance. Knobs of hills are sen- 
tineled by pine-trees ragged as Spanish soldiers. The crests of the 
ridges against the west are one uninterrupted forest, in whose shadow 
insects drone in undisturbed quiet and violets blow with no one to pick 
them. To the east is a zigzag line of hills, indented here and there by 
an intruding valley or a road with its smoke of dust. On a sudden, a 
point of green hills shoots up like the tangled leap of some emerald 
fountain, and this hill catches and holds sunlight when the valley thinks 
the sun has set. A dusty road ambles along the river's brink like some 
loitering lad; and along this a wagon rattles or a carriage clatters, or a 
workman stoops with a lunch pail empty in his hand, or the woman and 
her lover linger in the dusk, or a little child with bare feet patters in the 
dust or wades in the clear stream edging the road with its indescribable 
loveliness, and the wind “shakes from the trees the dust of day,’’ as 
Victor Hugo has it. 
This retreat reminds me of New England hills, which always appeal 
to me as a loveliness almost unapproachable. In New England hills is 
a redundancy of moss and ferns and grasses and deep oozy earth, and 
deep chalices in which the waters rest from motion, obscured from 
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