78 Native Brooks. 



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 per- 

 petuating this particular variety, and know nothing of selec- 

 tion for the good of their kind, and so nibble two small holes 

 in every nut. There is also a peperidge, or sour gum tree, 

 near the brook, which is next in size to the large one on 

 New Dorp lane. It has long served as a 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 squirrel 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, ever attains such a deep blood color as the 

 peperidge tree. 



Brooks are not only in sympathy with the seasons, but 

 they are glad or sad at we take them, and the Moravian 

 brook, as it winds its way mid the white and gray tomb- 

 stones 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 Revolution, and where was 

 enacted that tragedy that makes the place so interesting. 



