232 
RURAL HOURS. 
Friday, 3d. — Walked in the woods. Our sweet-fern is a 
pleasant plant ; there is always something very agreeable in a 
shrub or tree with fragrant foliage ; the perfume is rarely sickly ; 
as occasionally happens with flowers, it is almost always grateful 
and refreshing. These aromatic leaves of the sweet-fern are fre- 
quently used in rustic practice to stop bleeding ; we have never 
seen the remedy tried, but have often heard it recommended. 
Some of our good-wives also make a tea of the leaves, which they 
say is very strengthening, and good for hemorrhage of the lungs. 
The plant is also used in home-made beer. 
Strictly speaking, the botanists do not call this a fern, but it 
looks very much as if Adam may have called it so. It is the 
only plant of the kind, in temperate cHmates, with a woody stem. 
The botanical name of Comptonia was given it, after a bishop of 
London, of the last century, who was a great botanist. 
In some of the northern counties of New York, Herkimer and 
Warren, for instance, acres of wild lands, whole mountain-sides, 
are covered with this plant, even to the exclusion, in many places, 
of the whortleberry ; in that part of the country it also grows as 
a weed by the road-side, like the thistles and mulleins. In our 
own neighborhood it is chiefly confined to the woods. 
Saturday, 4th. — Pleasant day. At nine o'clock in the evening 
set out for a moonlight walk on Mount . Beautiful night ; 
the rising moon shone through the branches, filling the woods, as 
it were, with wild fantastic forms never seen by day ; one seems 
at such moments to be moving in a new world, among trees and 
plants of another creation. The brake had a very pecuhar aspect, 
a faint silvery light lay upon its fronds, even in the shade, giving 
the idea that in the sunshine they must be much paler in color 
