Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/191

Rh luck have no great difficulty in finding it again.

That was forty years ago. Now, the huckleberry bushes have followed the grass. Massachusetts land belongs to the woods. Clear it never so thoroughly, and with half a chance the trees will have it back again. If you will climb any Massachusetts hill, not directly upon the seashore,—and I am not certain that even that exception need be made,—you will see the truth of this at once. Something like it, I remember, was the first thing I thought of when I stood first on Mount Wachusett. There lay the whole State, so to speak, outspread below; and it was all a forest.

In this very Old Colony town many acres that were once excellent pasturage are now so perfectly reconverted to woodland that no ordinary walker over them would suspect that they had ever been anything else. If this has happened within twenty miles of Boston, within half the lifetime of a man, there seems to be no great danger that the State will ever be deforested; and those of us who love wild things, and look upon civ-