Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/190

172 pushed about a little, in one direction and another, and finding nothing but woods, returned to the path and retraced my steps. I might as well try to find my own lost youth as those well-remembered huckleberry patches.

Even in that far-away time—so the recollection comes to me now—the place was not strictly a pasture. It had been such, no doubt, and Harvey White, whoever he was, had owned it. Probably his cattle had once been pastured there. Now he owned no land, being nothing but a clod himself, and this broad clearing would not have kept a single cow from starvation. The wilderness was claiming its own again. Instead of the grass had come up the huckleberry bushes, the New England heather. These, with a sprinkling of blackberry vines, barberry bushes, and savins, filled the place from end to end. We knew them all. In the season we gathered huckleberries, blackberries, and barberries (the last made what some gastronomic cobbler called felicitously "shoe-peg sauce"), while the young cone-shaped cedars were of use as landmarks. We could leave a pail or basket in the shelter of one, and with good