The path leading into it was still open, but there was no need to go far to discover that here, as in Harvey White’s, the wood had got the upper hand of everything else. “I should starve here,” I said to myself, “at the very height of the berry season.” Nothing looked natural--nothing but the superimposed boulders. They had suffered no change, or none except an inevitable “subjective” dwindling. As for the old apple orchard near them (in which I shot my last bird upwards of twenty years ago), it was more like a cedar grove, although by searching for them one could still discover a few stumps and ruins of what had once been apple trees. “Perish your civilization!” Mother Nature seemed to be saying. “Give me a few years, and I will undo the whole of it.” I was half glad to hear her. The planter of the orchard was dead long ago, and his work had followed him. But the holly trees! They are Nature’s own children. I would have a look at them, remembering perfectly, I thought, the exact spot where a pretty bunch used to grow. And I found them, after a protracted search--but no longer a pretty clump. One tree was perhaps fifteen feet high--a beanpole, which still put forth at the very top a few branchlets, one or two feet in length, just to prove itself alive. The rest of the bunch had been cut down to the ground. All that remained was a few suckers, each with a spray of green leaves. The sight was pitiful. Poor trees! They were surrounded by a dense wood, instead of standing in the open, as they had done in my day. And between the competition of the pines and the knives and axes of collectors of Christmas greenery, they were nigh to extermination. By and by, however, before many years, the pines will fall under the axe. Then, I dare say, the old holly roots will have their turn again. Then, too, the checkerberry vines will enjoy a few years of fruitfulness. So the wheel of fortune goes round, all the world over, in the wood no less than in the city. There is no scotching it. As well try to scotch the earth itself. All things are at seesaw. “They say the lion and the lizard keep The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep; And Bahrám, that great hunter--the wild ass Stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.” If such things have happened, if Nineveh and Babylon flourished and came to naught, why wonder at the decline and fall of Old Colony berry pastures? SQUIRRELS, FOXES, AND OTHERS “Do you know where there are any flying squirrels?” I asked a friend, two or three weeks ago. My friend, I should mention, is a farmer, living a mile or two away from the village, and, being much out-of-doors with his eyes open, has sometimes good things to show me. With all the rest, he has more than once taken me to a flying squirrel’s tree and given me a chance to see the creature “fly.”