Near by a spreading yew monopolizes a rocky bit of ground, its foliage creeping above a silvery gray bed of branching moss, whose pillowy tufts spread almost to my feet. This was my fairy forest of tiny trees. Here I found the fairies’ cups and torches, and even now I can see their scarlet tips scattered here and there among the gray; and fragile little parasols, too--it were an insult, indeed, to designate such dainty things as these by the name of toadstools. Beyond this bed of moss a scrubby growth of whortleberry takes possession of the ground. The bushes are now bare of fruit, but ruddy with their autumn blushes, tingeing the surface of the knoll with a delicate coral pink. This thicket extends far down upon the slope, even encroaching upon the wheel-ruts of the lane, and across again, until cut short by an ancient tumbling line of lichen-covered stones, a landmark which has long since yielded up its claim as a barrier of protection to the old orchard it encloses, now only a moss-grown pile, with every chink and crevice a nestling-place of some searching tendril, fern, or clambering vine. For rods and rods it creeps along beneath the laden apple-trees, skirting the borders of this old farm lane, and finally hides away among a clump of cedars a few hundred feet away. Of all the picturesque in nature, what is there, after all, that so wins one’s deeper sympathies as the ever-changing pictures of a rustic lane or roadside, with its weather-beaten walls and fences, and their rambling growth of weeds and creeping vines? How sweet the sense of near companionship awakened by these charming way-side pastorals that accompany you in your saunterings, and reach out to touch you as you pass--a sense of friendly fellowship that breathes a silent greeting in the most deserted paths or loneliest of by-ways! Show me a ruined wall or a rutted zigzag fence, and I will show you a string of pearls, or rather, if in these later months, a fringe of gems, for the autumn fence is set in wreaths of rubies and glowing sapphires. Follow its rambling course, now through the field, now skirting swampy fallows, now by rustic lanes and cornfields and over rocky pastures, and you will follow a lead that will take you through the rarest bits of nature’s autumn landscape. Even in this lane, at the foot of the knoll below us, see the brilliant luxuriance of clustered bitter-sweet draping the side of that clump of cedars! It is only an indication of the beauty that envelops this lane for a full half mile beyond. Every angle of its rude rail fence encloses a lovely pastoral, each a surprise and a contrast to its neighbor.