It is such a jaunt inland to the woods that should invite the traveller, in any season, to forsake his motor-car for a sober “horse and team” as the better equipment to circumvent obstacles of unbridged stream or fallen tree. If even as he threads the crowded village street he can occupy his imagination with the leisurely past that matches the rate of his progress, his pleasure will be the greater; and the effort prove not too difficult when, as of old, poplar and willows shade the road and elms droop impartially over gray homesteads and the passer-by, or behind decent screens of shrub and hedge houses blink with a modest air of being sufficient for all desirable comfort. Farther afield wayside tangles of wild rose and cherry, and scented racemes of the locust-tree, in their season, make the air sweet; or in a later month, bright companies of orange lilies are drawn up at attention by the rail fence that has worn to a beautiful silvery hue, and Joe Pyeweed nods at thoroughwort in the swamp. Fields of warm-toned grass roll down to the blur of willows in a meadow; in pastures intersected by crumbling stone walls stalwart purple and white blooms rout the fading mists of succory. And there on the outskirts of the village, hills are dressed in homespun woven of sparse grasses and crisp gray moss buttoned down with clumps of bayberry and juniper, adorned in summer by the filmy lace of the indigo-plant, and in autumn with a lovely cloak of dwarf goldenrod and asters. Far to the north, now, lies the silver shield of the bay; inland, beyond the hills, deep-set in wooded banks is a glint of blue water, and near at hand a farm guarded by the spear of a pine that tops the roof twice over. The road dips sharply to a brook that bubbles along with a force that once turned mill wheels, and rises again in a graceful curve to a hill where stands a weather-beaten house as if a-tiptoe to survey in the meadows of the farther view the secret beauties of a lake. A few miles more, and there, among the wooded uplands that make the watershed between sea and bay, lies a network of interlacing roads: “blind roads” where scrub oaks and pines lash the traveller and the horse proceeds with a careful foot among the springes of a vigorous younger growth; narrow tracks that lead to the _cul-de-sac_ of a cranberry swamp or a woodlot where the axe has been busy with its work of denudation; or long arched aisles of green, with here a little bay a-dance with ferns washing out into the woodland, and there a vista of hills opening through mullioned windows built by the straight trunks of the pines. And here are the great ponds with bold sandy bluffs and curves that cheat us into believing them larger than they are. They are pictures of security as their waves sparkle in the sun and break idly on the miniature beaches, but quick squalls may come cutting down from the hills to lash them into a sudden ugly fury that bodes ill for any stray craft