BAKER FARM. 
Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like 
temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy 
boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and 
shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks 
to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flints’ 
Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, 
spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Val¬ 
halla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with 
wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen 
hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toad¬ 
stools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, 
and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butter¬ 
flies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink 
and dogwood grow, the red alder-berry glows like eyes 
of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest 
woods in its folds, and the wild-holly berries make the 
beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is 
dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden 
fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of calling on 
some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees, of 
kinds which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far 
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