"Five or six acres--thereabout." "How long have you been on it?" "Five years." "And only five acres cleared? That is very little in five years. I have seen people who had cleared twice that quantity of land in half the time." He replied, almost with fierceness, "Then they had money, or friends, or hands to help them: I have neither. I have in this wide world only myself! and set a man with only a pair of hands at one of them big trees there!--see what he'll make of it! You may swing the axe here from morning to night for a week before you let the daylight in upon you." "You are right!" I said, in compassion and self-reproach, "and I was wrong! pray excuse me!" "No offence." "Are you from the old country?" "No, I was _raised_ here." "What will you do with your pigeon there?" "O, it will do for the boy's supper, or may be he may like it best to play with." I offered to redeem its life at the price of a shilling, which I held out. He stretched forth immediately one of his huge hands and eagerly clutched the shilling, at the same moment opening the other, and releasing his captive; it fluttered for a moment helplessly, but soon recovering its wings, wheeled round our heads, and then settled in the topmost boughs of a sugar-maple. The man turned away with an exulting laugh, thinking, no doubt, that he had the best of the bargain--but upon this point we differed. * * * * * Turning the horses' heads again westward, we plunged at once into the deep forest, where there was absolutely no road, no path, except that which is called a _blazed_ path, where the trees marked on either side are the only direction to the traveller. How savagely, how solemnly wild it was! So thick was the overhanging foliage, that it not only shut out the sunshine, but almost the daylight; and we travelled on through a perpetual gloom of vaulted boughs and intermingled shade. There were no flowers here--no herbage. The earth beneath us was a black, rich vegetable mould, into which the cart-wheels sank a foot deep; a rank, reedy grass grew round the roots of the trees, and sheltered rattlesnakes and reptiles. The timber was all hard timber, walnut, beech, and bass-wood, and oak and maple of most luxuriant growth; here and there the lightning had struck and shivered one of the loftiest of these trees, riving the great trunk in two, and flinging it horizontally upon its companions. There it lay, in strangely picturesque fashion, clasping with its huge boughs their outstretched arms as if for support. Those which had been hewn to open a path lay where they fell, and over their stumps and roots the cart had to be lifted or dragged. Sometimes a swamp or morass lay in our road, partly filled up or laid over with trunks of fallen trees, by way of bridge.