Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/161

Rh you are glad to find. The largest of the trees have been felled, but nobody has dug out the protruding boulders or blasted away the outcropping ledges. One good word we may say for death. It lasts well. It is nothing like a vapor.

Not a rod of the way but talks to you of something. Here, on the left, down in the hollow by the swamp, you used to set snares. Once—fateful day!—you found a partridge in the noose. Then what a fury possessed you! If you had shot your first elephant you could hardly have been more completely beside yourself. It was a cruel sight; you felt it so; but you had caught a partridge! With all your boyish unskillfulness you had lured the unhappy bird to his death. A spray of red barberries had been too bright for his resistance. He discovered his mistake when the cord began to pull. "Oh, why was I such a fool!" he thought; just as you have thought more than once since then, when you have run your own neck into some snare of the fowler.

Yonder, on the right, grew little scattered patches of trailing arbutus. Every spring