Now for the stone wall. On the other side are thick set the thorny
stalks of last summer's "high-bush" blackberries. A plunge and a
scramble take you through in comparative safety; and stopping only to
disengage your skirts from a too-fond bramble, you are in the woodland.
Thick-strewn the dead leaves lie under foot. What music there is in the
rustling murmur with which they greet your invading step! On, deeper and
deeper into the wood,--now dodging under the green and snaky cat-briers,
with their retractile thorns and vicious clinging grasp,--now dashing
along the woodman's paths,--now struggling among the opposing
underwood. At last a little sprig of feathery green catches the eye.
It is a tuft of moss. No,--it is the running ground-pine; and clearing
away, with both eager hands, leaves, sticks, moss, and all the fallen
_exuciae_ of the summertime, you tear up long wreaths of that most
graceful of evergreens. Then, in another quarter of the woodland, where
the underbrush has been killed by the denser shade, there rise the
exquisite fan-shaped plumes of the feather-pine, of deepest green, or
brown-golden with the pencil of the frost;--for cross or star or thick
festoon, there is nothing so beautiful.
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