Ik 



WINTER SUNSHINE, 



27 



ing in the burnt ends, adding another branch and yet 

 another, and looking back as he turns to go to catch 

 one more glimpse of the smoke going up through the 

 trees ! I reckon it is some remnant of the primitive 

 man, which we all carry about with us. He has not 

 yet forgotten his wild, free life, his arboreal habitations, 

 and the sweet-bitter times he had in those long-gone 

 ages. With me, he wakes up directly at the smell of 

 smoke, of burning branches in the open air ; and all 

 his old love of fire and dependence upon it, in the 

 camp or the cave, comes freshly to mind. 



On resuming our march, we filed off along a charm- 

 ing wood-path — a regular little tunnel through the 

 dense pines, carpeted with silence, and allowing us to 

 look nearly the whole length of it through its soft, 

 green twilight out into the open sunshine of the fields 

 beyond. A pine wood in Maryland or in Virginia is 

 quite a different thing from a pine wood in Maine or 

 Minnesota — the difference, in fact, between yellow 

 pine and white. The former, as it grows hereabout, is 

 short and scrubby, with branches nearly to the ground, 

 and looks like the dwindling remnant of a greater race. 



Beyond the woods, the path led us by a colored man's 

 habitation — a little, low frame house, on a knoll, sur- 

 rounded by the quaint devices and rude makeshifts of 

 these quaint and rude people. A few poles stuck in 

 the ground, clapboarded with cedar-boughs and corn- 

 stalks, and supporting a roof of the same, gave shelter 

 to a rickety one-horse wagon and some farm imple- 



