Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/198

180 observer would scarcely have noticed them. Tufts of beard-grass stood above the snow,—"Indian grass," my guide called it,—and the remains of an ancient stone wall still marked the line, if one might guess, where the grazing-land had been divided from the tillage. It was a farm in ruins.

Soon we came to a larger cellar-hole, of which, as of the smaller one, bushes and trees had long ago taken possession. Here had stood the city house, a "frame" structure (whence its name, probably), a famous affair in its day, the pride of its owner's heart. It was one of five or six houses, if I understood my informant correctly, that had once been scattered over this part of the town of Weston (or what is at present the town of Weston) within a radius of a mile or so. Of them all not a trace remains now but so many half-filled cellars.

I thought of something I had been saying lately about the manner in which the forest reclaims Massachusetts land as soon as its human possessors let go their hold upon it. Now it was suggested to me that if a man is ambitious to do something that will last, he