A Window in Arcady 
June i. —Whisky Run may be in almost any county, 
for, after our ancestors had given the jovial name to one 
sequestered brook among our wooded hills, the habit seems 
to have grown on them, and they gave it to still another, 
and so on, until, like Jones and Robinson among human 
patronymics, the appellative lost distinctiveness. On the 
other side of the ridge, like as not, flows Brandy Run, 
making its stony bed in a similar little glen. Such names 
are quite meaningless to-day, but they serve as picturesque 
memorials of a time when small distilleries, long since 
forgotten, nestled in many a shady pocket of the slopes now 
given over to soberer sort of work. 
These days of early summer are odorous in our 
Whisky Run with the spicy breath of the wild cherry 
in bloom, and upon the mossy bank violets and Solomon’s 
seal and bellwort, Indian cucumber, sweet cicely and “sas- 
parell” are sociably flowering. Its upper waters flow 
through sunny meadows, where spearmint grows, to 
breathe whose aromatic fragrance is like inhaling a poem, 
As children most of us have chewed the leaves of this 
beloved plant for the sake of their sweet, biting warmth, 
speedily changed into tingling coolness by a draught of 
water. The gathering of it forms one of the countryside’s 
minor industries in spring and early summer, when you 
see men clipping it in the meadows and tying their spoil 
into bunches to be sold to the mutton butchers in town for 
eventual use in the making of mint sauce. 
In the vicinity of old gardens peppermint also may be 
found growing wild in the grass, but it is not so abundant 
as the spearmint, from which it is distinguished by longer 
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