Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/164

Rh me greatly by his anecdotes of natural history and his friendly attentions.

In the evenings when I and my young friends are alone, we read; Maria reads her husband's poetry charmingly well, or I relate to them some little romantic passage, or a Swedish love or ghost-story, or I beg of them to relate such to me. In this way I soon become at home in a family.

But the New World is too young, and has too few old houses and old rubbish for ghosts to thrive there; and as to love-stories they do not seem to be remarkable enough to become historical, except in the homes and the hearts where they live in silence. But still, every home in which I have yet lived gives me its love-history, as its best flower, before I have left it; it always amuses me very much, and I am filled with manifold admiration of the blind, or rather the clairvoyant, god's devices for making one out of two.

I go out every day, either with my young friends or alone. With them I visited, to-day, Mount Auburn, the great burial-place of Boston, a romantic, park-like district, with hills and valleys, and beautiful trees. Elms seem to be the favourite trees of Massachussets. I never saw such large and beautiful elms as here. They shoot aloft, palm-like, with branching trunks, and spread forth their crowns, bending down their branches in the most pliant and graceful manner. In their branches, now leafless, I often see a little, well-built bird's-nest hang, swinging in the wind. It is a small and very delicate bird, called the oriole, which thus builds a cradle for its young, and its bed must be very pleasant. It has thus built in the branches of an immense elm at Cambridge, called Washington's elm.

The weather is for the most part beautiful and sunny, and the colour of the sky wonderfully clear and bright. Its beauty and the transparency of the atmosphere charms