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WALDEN, 
life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry 
vines run round its legs; pine cones,, chestnut burs, and 
strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if 
this was the way these forms came to be transferred to 
our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads, — because 
they once stood in their midst. 
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on 
the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young 
forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen 
rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led 
down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, 
blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and golden- 
rod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground¬ 
nut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry, (cerasus 
pumila ,) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate 
flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short 
stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good 
sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like 
rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment 
to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The 
sumach, (rhus glabra ,) grew luxuriantly about the house, 
pushing up through the embankment which I had made, 
and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad 
pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to 
look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in 
the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be 
dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful 
green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and 
sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did 
they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh 
and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, 
when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off 
by its own weight. In August, the large masses of 
