But we are wasting time and shall never get into the woods. In the winter wild you will hardly get far into them, except at the Christmas season for greenery. Gathering this by deputy is poor business. It is all very well, if you can do no better, to engage Mr. Brown to engage some one else to bring in the needed spruce, fir, and hemlock with which to obscure the fresco deformities of St. Boniface's; but it is far better to hunt for them yourself. There is something intensely delightful in the changes of the search; for it begins dull enough. You start in the drear December weather, with a gray sky and leaden clouds softly shaded in regular billows, like an India-ink ocean, overhead, and a somewhat muddy lane before you. Then to pick one's way across the plashy meadows, and, after a ticklish pass of jumping from one reedy tussock to another, to get once more upon the firm soil, while the grass, dry and crisp under your feet, gives a pleasant _whish, whish_, as it does the duty of street-door-mat to your mud-beclogged sandals. 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. And again you are attracted into the thickets of laurel, and wage fierce war upon the sturdy and tenacious, yet brittle branches, till you are transformed into a walking jack-o'-the-green. The holly of the English Christmas, all-besprent with crimson drops, is hard to be found in New England, and you will have to thread the courses of the brooks to seek the swamp-loving black alder, which will furnish as brilliant a berry, but without the beautiful thorny leaf. Only in one patch of woodland do I know of the holly. In the southeastern corner of Massachusetts,--if you will take the trouble to follow up a railroad-track for a couple of miles and then plunge into the pine woods, you will come upon a few lonely, stunted scraps of