leanness, angularity, and crumbling decrepitude are with the young mountains; all the smoothness, plumpness, graceful flowing lines of youth are with the old mountains. Not till the rocks are clothed with soil made out of their own decay are outlines softened and life made possible. Youthful mountains like the Alps are battle-marked by the elements, and their proud heads are continually being laid low by frost, wind, and snow; they are scarred and broken by avalanches the season through. Old mountains, such as the Appalachian range, wear an armor of soil and verdure over their rounded forms on which the arrows of time have little effect. The turbulent and noisy and stiff-necked period of youth is far behind them. Hundreds of dairy-farms nestle in the laps of the Catskills; and their huge, grassy aprons, only a little wrinkled here and there, hold as many grazing herds. Woodchuck Lodge is well upon the knee of one of the ranges, and the fields we look upon are like green drapery lying in graceful curves and broad, smooth masses over huge extended limbs. Patches of maple forest here and there bend over a rounded arm or shoulder, like a fur cape upon a woman. Here and there also huge, weather-worn boulders rest upon the ground, dropped there by the moving ice-sheet tens upon tens of thousands of years ago; and here and there are streaks of land completely covered with smaller rocks wedged and driven into the ground. It used to be told me in my youth that the devil’s apron-string broke as he was carrying a load of these rocks overhead, and let the mass down upon the ground. The farmers seldom attempt to clear away these leavings of the devil. IV My interest in the birds is not as keen as it once was, but they are still an asset in my life. I must live where I can hear the crows caw, the robins sing, and the song-sparrow trill. If I can hear also the partridge drum, and the owl hoot, and the chipmunk cluck in the still days of autumn, so much the better. The crow is such a true countryman, so much at home everywhere, so thoroughly in possession of the land, going his way winter and summer in such noisy contentment and pride of possession, that I cannot leave him out. The bird I missed most in California was the crow. I missed his glistening coat in the fields, his ebony form and hearty call in the sky.