Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/338

 326 and falling sing-song. If the printers will help me, I will try and put the very tones in type: So, as we ascended and descended, I thought of the good brother's sing-song verse, and hoped that his successful accomplishment of his purpose, for he has long been in glory, might be not only exemplified in this minor effort, but in the major and maxima ones that absorb the whole life and being.

We had been going up, up, up; now we go down, down, downy. Far below the level of our original point of departure we plunge, sliding down on the close-set feet of the safe little Mexican horse, plunging through more than one degree of latitude.

The top gave us the high blue-berry bush just blossoming, a dear reminder of boyish tramps in Lynde's Woods, yet uncut, but every day in danger of the knife of the spoiler. May some good providence turn them to a use that shall perpetuate both their memories and their berries! A big town, well-nigh a city, is growing to them. If it would only appropriate them to a cemetery, how happy would one wanderer be to come and haunt them occasionally while living, and to sleep under them at the last, in age, even as he has slept under them often in happy days of a vanished childhood, awaiting the call of the clarion of the resurrection. Grand old trees, dear high blue-berry bushes, lowly huckleberry bushes, not the less lovely for your sweet humility.

So these humble bushes, where we sat and picked and laughed, and strove as to who should first fill his pail, and broke them in big armfuls, and took them to the shelter of the big trees for cooler stripping, how your black eyes now beam upon me, little