Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/167

Rh wind. The wind is an anarchist; it bloweth where it listeth, with small regard for human sovereignty.

Your land, to my eye, is of a piece with all the land round about; or it would be, only for its tall gray cliff. That is indeed a beauty, a true distinction; not so tall as it was forty or fifty years ago, of course, but still a brave and picturesque sight. I should like the illusion of owning a thing like that myself. And the brook just beyond, so narrow and so lively,—that, too, you may reasonably be proud of, though it is nothing but a wet-weather stream, coming from the hill and tumbling musically downward into Dyer's Run, past one boulder and another, from late autumn till late spring, and then going dry. You have only pleasant memories of it, for you were oftenest here in the wet season. It has always been one of your singularities, I remember, to be less in the woods in summer than at other times.

Now you have crossed your own boundary; but who would know it? You yourself seem not to feel the transition. The wood is one; and really it is all yours, as it is any man's