Everywhere the solemn cassandra pushed its black twigs up through the moss and held its leathery leaves, brown and discouraged, drooping yet persistent. The cassandra always reminds me of thin, elderly New England spinsters who enjoy poor health. It is so homely and solemn; even in joyous June it never cracks a smile, but is just as lugubrious and sallow and barely holds on to an unprofitable life. And all about, indeed in many places crowding the very life out of it, grow these brave, virid, white cedars. You’d think it might catch geniality from them. Their footing is as precarious as its own. Of course, now, the ice has set all things in its firm grip, but in summer there is little enough to hold up the swamp cedars and it is only by entwining their roots and growing them firmly together in a mat that they are able to keep their sprightly uprightness. So closely are the young trees set on the edge of their grove that it is difficult to penetrate their intertwining branches, and even when you have passed this barrier you find the trunks so close that often there is no room to go between them. Here all branches have passed and the straight trunks run upward in close parallels making all their struggle at the top. And a struggle it has been indeed for all that are now alive. You may note this by the bare poles of those that have lagged behind a little in the fight and lost the magic touch of sunlight on their tops. These are dead and bare, and their companions have so immediately taken up their slender space that you wonder how the dead ones ever got so far as they did. It is a very solemn temple under these cedars. The living wall the dead within the catacombs and the sighing of the motionless leaves above your head still leaves you in doubt. It may be trees that sorrow for dead neighbors or gasp in the struggle to retain their own breathing space.