My way to the most secret and withdrawn country of these wood roads always leads me across Ponkapog brook at the spot where rest the ruins of the old mill. It is three-quarters of a century or more since it ground grist, and of its timbers scarcely a moss-grown remnant remains. The gate to the old dam has been gone almost as long, but the waters do not forget. Every year the spring floods bring down what driftwood the pond banks can spare and bar their own course with it at this spot. The water rises as high as of old, for a brief time. It is as if the brook paid a memorial tribute thus yearly to the honest labor of the pioneers, now long gone. For a time it lasts, then the cementing bonds of dead leaves fail and the black flood roars through to the sea. Come two months later and where its highest rim touched you will find that it planted flowers in loving remembrance also, and saxifrage and dwarf blue violet lean in fragrant affection over the waters. I like to think that on Memorial day at least the stream makes echo of the clank of the old-time mill-wheel in its liquid prattle, and that the shuttle of reflected sunshine dancing back and forth is a glorified ghost of the old wheels whirling once more in memory of the miller and his neighbors. Farther on I reach the pond shore, and on the narrow ridge which marks the old-time high tide of winter ice pressure, a dry moraine always, though running through marshy land, I strike what must be the oldest trail in this part of the country. Here is a path which was traveled before the time of the Norman conquest, or, for that matter, before Cæsar led his victorious legions into Gaul. Here the first Indians trod dry-footed when they went back and forth about the pond in their hunting and fishing, for then, as now, it was a natural causeway. To-day a stranger, seeking his way about the pond for the first time, would not fail to find it, and the habitual wood-rover of the region, old or young, knows its every turn. Upon this to-day, between the marsh and the bog in the alluring spring sunshine, I found a whole bird convention. Such an uproar! It was as if the suffragettes in one grand concerted movement had swooped down upon Parliament by the air-ship route, as the cable says they threaten, and were in the heat of battering down its walls of deafness with racket and roaring, after the fashion of the attempt on Jericho of old.