Not a rod of the way but talks to you of something. Here, on the left, down in the hollow by the swamp, you used to set snares. Once--fateful day!--you found a partridge in the noose. Then what a fury possessed you! If you had shot your first elephant you could hardly have been more completely beside yourself. It was a cruel sight; you felt it so; but you had caught a partridge! With all your boyish unskillfulness you had lured the unhappy bird to his death. A spray of red barberries had been too bright for his resistance. He discovered his mistake when the cord began to pull. “Oh, why was I such a fool!” he thought; just as you have thought more than once since then, when you have run your own neck into some snare of the fowler. Yonder, on the right, grew little scattered patches of trailing arbutus. Every spring you gathered a few blossoms, going thither day after day, watching for them to open. And the patches are there still. Some of them are no broader than a dinner plate, and the largest of them would not cover the top of a bushel basket. For more than fifty years--perhaps for more than five hundred--they have looked as they do now; a few score of leaves and an annual crop of a dozen or two of flowers. Their endurance, with so many greedy hands after them, is one of the miracles. Probably they are older than any tree in the township. It isn’t the tall things that live longest. Here the path goes through an opening in a rude stone wall, which was tumbling down as long ago as you can remember. Beyond it, in your day, stood a dense pine wood, a darksome, solemn place, where you went quietly. Now, not a pine is left. A mere wilderness of hardwood scrub. The old “cart-path,” which at this point swerved to the left, has grown over till there is no following it. But the loss does not matter. You take a trail among the boulders, a trail familiar to you of old; the same that you took in winter, skates in hand, bound for Jason Halfbrook’s meadow. Many a merry hour you spent there, heedless of the cold. You could skate then, or thought you could. The backward circle, the “Dutch roll,” the “spread-eagle,” these and other wonders were in your repertory. They were feats to be proud of, and you made the most of them. Nor need you feel ashamed now at the recollection. When the Preacher said, “There is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works,” he was not thinking exclusively of an author and his books. You did well to be proud while you were able. It was pride, in part, that kept you warm. Now, if you stand beside a city skating-resort, you see young fellows performing feats that throw all your old-fashioned, countrified accomplishments into the shade. You look on, open-mouthed. Boys of to-day have better skates than you had. Perhaps they have better legs. One thing they do not have,--a better time.