Only one branch remains to be spoken of, for I took but a small handful: a dark-green--blackish-green--tarnished stem, the two branches of which bear each a terminal bud of the size of a pea. This specimen you will know at once by its odor, if you were ever happy enough to dig sassafras roots, or to eat sassafras lozenges, such as used to come--perhaps they do still--rolled up in paper, as bankers roll up coins. “Sassafras lossengers,” we called them, and the shopkeeper (who is living yet, and still “tending store” at ninety-odd) seemed never in doubt as to what we meant. Each kind of lozenge, peppermint, cayenne, checkerberry, and the rest, came always in paper of a certain color. Can I be wrong in my recollection of the sassafras tint? I would soon find out if I could go into the old store. I would lay five cents upon the counter (the price used to be less than that, but it may have gone up since my last purchase), and say, “A roll of sassafras lossengers.” And I miss my guess, or the wrapper would be yellow.[3] OLD COLONY BERRY PASTURES The last holiday of the century found me in the place where I was born, with weather made on purpose for out-of-door pleasures--warm, bright, and still. A sudden inspiration took me. I would go to see the old berry pastures--not all of them (the forenoon would hardly be long enough for that), but two or three of the nearest, on opposite sides of the same back road. It would be a kind of second boyhood. As I traveled the road itself, past two or three houses that were not there in the old time, two at least of the older wayside trees greeted me with the season’s compliments. Or possibly it was I that greeted them. In this kind of intercourse, it is hard to tell speaker from hearer. We greeted each other, let us say, though they are the older, and by good rights should have spoken first. They have held their own exceedingly well, far better than the clerk who is writing about them, and for anything that appears, bid fair to be hale and hearty at the next century-mark. One is a pear tree; none of your modern, high-bred, superfine, French-named dwarfs, rather shrubs than trees, twenty of which may grow, without crowding, in a scanty back garden, but a burly, black-barked, stubby-branched, round-topped giant. It looks to-day exactly as it did when my boyish legs first took me by it. In these many years it has borne thousands of bushels of pears, all of which must have served some use, I suppose, in the grand economy of things, though I have no idea what. No man, woman, or child, I am reasonably sure, ever had the hardihood to eat one. And still the tree holds up its head and wears a brave, unashamed, undiscourageable look. Long may it stand in its corner, a relic and remembrancer of Puritanic times.