Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/63

 "The Bemis Place" of the elder days of Ponkapoag village. It seems as if all the lighter, sweeter fancies that laugh or slip, tear in eye, through his verse, whirled like rose petals on summer winds or danced like butterflies into the little valley on which the westward study windows looked. Through this, right in the foreground, flows Ponkapoag brook, and on it falls slowly into decay an ancient mill, a relic of the early days of the village. The old dam no longer restrains the water which gurgles along the stones below it, humming to itself a quatrain which never was meant for it, but which voices the fate of the shallow mill pond, which has been empty for so many long years that it is no longer a pond but a tiny meadow in which cattle cool their feet and feed contentedly. Here the spendthrift brook sings contentedly:

"The fault's not mine, you understand; God shaped my palm, so I can hold But little water in my hand  And not much gold."

In the meadow and along the brookside blooms to-day the Habenaria psycodes, the smaller purple