Some four or five years ago, there came to reside in the neighborhood in which I then lived a family consisting of three persons--an old lady, a young man, and a child of some fourteen years. The cottage they took was divided by a little strip of woods from my own home; and I well remember how rejoiced I was on first seeing the blue smoke curling up from the high red chimneys, for the house had been a long time vacant, and the prospect of having near neighbors gave me delight. Perhaps, too, I was not the less pleased that they were new neighbors. We are likely to under-estimate persons and things we have continually about us; but let separation come, and we learn what they were to us. _Apropos_ of this--in the little grove I have spoken of I remember there was an oak tree, taller by a great deal than its fellows; and a thousand times I have felt as though its mates must be oppressed with a painful sense of degradation, and really wished the axe were laid at its root. At last, one day I heard the ringing strokes of that fatal instrument, and, on inquiry, was told that the woodman had received orders no longer to _spare that tree_. Eagerly I listened at first--every stroke was like the song of victory; then the gladness subsided, and I began to marvel how the woods would look with the monarch fallen; then I thought, the glory will have departed, and began to reflect on myself as having sealed its death warrant, so that when the crash, telling that the mighty was fallen, woke the sleeping echoes from the hills, I cannot tell how sad an echo it waked also in my heart. If I could see it standing once more, just once more! but I could not, and till this day I feel a twinge when I think of the tall oak. But the new neighbors. Some curiosity mingled with my pleasure, I confess, and so, as soon as I thought they were settled, and feeling at home, I made my toilet with unusual care for the first call. The cottage was somewhat back from the main road, and access to it was had by a narrow grass-grown lane, bordered on one side by a green belt of meadow land, and on the other by the grove, sloping upward and backward to a clayey hill, where, with children and children's children, about them, "The rude forefathers of the hamlet slept."