U2 Native brooks. 



for their thin shells and large size. The wild mice have also found 

 this out and congregate at the foot of the tree in a little pile of stones. 

 They are not in favor of perpetuating this pai ticular variety, and 

 know nothing of selection for the good of their kind, and so nibble 

 two little holes in every nut 



There is also a peperidge, or sour gum tree near this brook, which 

 is next in size to the large one on New Dorp lane. It has long served 

 as the corner ,of a fence, and perhaps is the mark of an old boundary 

 line. The fence rails enter its hollow trunk at right angles, and are 

 fastened to an old post propped up inside the cavity. A gray squir- 

 rel retreated to the tree, and wasps flew in circles about their home 

 in its broken top one September day, when the leaves were just 

 commencing to turn to that beautiful crimson, so characteristic of 

 the peperidge tree. Not even the red maple, with its red flowers in 

 spring, its branch-tips red, and its vivid red leaves in autumn has 

 such a deep blood color as these peperidge leaves. 



Brooks are not only in sympathy with the seasons, but they are 

 glad or sad as we take them, and the Moravian brook, as it winds its 

 way mid the white and gray tombstones in the cemetery, seems to be 

 in accord with the scene. It is not the glad little brook that starts 

 from the Woolsey pond on the Todt Hill road, nor does it seem the 

 same that flows through the low lying meadows to New Creek by 

 the shore. Out on these meadows it is joined by the stream from 

 Garretson's, one branch of which rises in Mersereau's valley, where 

 the hermit had his cabin by the spring in the days of the lie volu- 

 tion, and where that tragedy that makes the place so interesting was 

 enacted. 



An old deserted farm house with hand made lath and beams, and 

 filled in with mud, stands on the hill facing this deep ravine, and the 

 outlook extending to the ocean beyond is one of the most pleasing on 

 the Island. Some of the orchard trees are very large and have many 

 tenants among the birds, and cardinal gross-beaks live Winter and 

 Summer mid the cat-brier on the hill side. 



The other branch of this brook rises in the swamp where George 

 Reed, and his father before him, raised willows for making baskets. 

 The trees still remain and "forget-me-nots" grow along the brook 

 bank, but the house is gone. 



To the nortlnvest of Richmond there is a wild piece of country and 



