white-crested waves. Even the pastures, which have been a long time shorn of their ancient sylvan beauty, are not naked. They have put on a mottled garment of sumac-trees, barberry-bushes, bayberry-shrubs, sweet-ferns, huckleberry patches, high and low blackberries in braid and tangle, and white clover, and the common upland grasses in broad folds and spangled scarfs. At some points close to the sea, the woods are majestic. Elsewhere the stunted yellow-pines, in connection with the rocks and the sea, seem just as admirably in place, and remind one of what Ruskin observes in admiration of the stone-pines of Italy. In the more extensive woods, the oaks, maples, birches, and pines, common in other parts of New England, are found. The hickory grows in every woodland tract, the butternut in a few places; but the chestnut is nowhere seen. Some divisions of the forest are almost entirely covered with beeches. There is a thrifty grove of oaks in the Lanesville woods, the result of the attempt of one man to raise a grove from the sowing of acorns. He lived to walk in the shade of these trees. There are white-pines here and there, in groups, which overtop all other trees of the forest. And on many knolls and slopes there are groves of young whitepines, so thickly planted that the ground which they cover is but sparsely flecked with sunlight. Walking on the dry, red needles, beneath their dense green roofs, one tries in vain to get a glimpse

in the Middle grows both in It is a beauti

its branches, and Its limbs stretch

of the sky. In these groves there is the stillness of far-off woods, where no man passes by, the stillness which is only broken by the note of a tiny flycatcher, or the soft, sweet song of the hermit thrush. The tupelo, or crab-tree, States called the sour-gum tree, moist places and on high grounds. ful tree, both for the fashion of the gloss of its dark-green leaves. out from the trunk all round, horizontally, the topmost farthest; and all, from the trunk to the outermost twigs, with angles, giving a gnarled effect: so that the tree is wide and flat on the top, and gnarled throughout. It is the first of the trees of the forest to show, amid the general green and shade, the flame of ripened leaves. Before the white-birch exhibits a single leaf of orange, before the maple of the swamp holds out to our sight its earliest spray of scarlet, the tupelo is a beacon in full blaze, lighting up the sylvan shadows as the pillar of fire lighted up the gloom of night. The elm towers gracefully from the deep soil of our meadows and ravines, but most of the elms of our streets and homesteads were brought from abroad; many from Ipswich, and some from far-off valleys of New Hampshire and Maine. The ash is a common tree in our woods; and when the various colors of the autumn leaves are brightest, its delicate amber is presented in the gorgeous display. The hemlock, justly praised by

Downing as one of the more beautiful of the evergreens, is as much at home on our rocky slopes and ridges as on the banks of the Mattawamkeag, or the hills and promontories around Umbagog or Moosehead Lake. The red-cedars, or savins, are thickly scattered over many of the pastures. Their dark-hued, taper shapes, rigid and erect, alike through calm and storm, through summer's heat and winter's cold, scarcely showing from year to year a change from growth, are the Stoics of the realm of trees. To them it is all the same, if the air be bland and sweet, or rigorous and bitter with tempest and hail. Of all heights, from the tiny ones of two feet to the full-grown of fifteen and twenty, they stand on hill-tops, ledges, and slopes; on the edges of precipices; here and there clinging to the perpendicular front of a precipice, their foothold but a crevice or crack midway from the ground or brink; singly and in groups over acres on acres of granite steeps and rugged undulations. They are ever inflexible, without perceptible mutation, whether the sward is green and sprinkled with white-clover blossoms, or wearing a hoary covering of frost and snow; whether the purple finches come in the fervid season to dwell and sing on their fragrant, evergreen branches, or the quails in the frigid months to cuddle on the ground beneath them. And there are flowering trees and shrubs which fulfil charmingly a part of the beneficent appointment of God, that the hard and

rough places of the earth should be clothed and adorned. Conspicuous among these are the locusts. When in blossom, these trees, in groups near many dwellings, and in rows by the roadside, are as snowy clouds, hanging low, and touching roof and wall, and trailing along the ground. Far around them the air is laden with their perfume. The wild red-cherry, the shad-bush, the alders, the sumacs, the barberry-bush, the elders, the wild-roses, and the laurels, all present their show of beauty in their appointed seasons. The mountain-laurels in our woods, as thrifty and rank a short distance southward from Cape Pond as anywhere in Maryland or Virginia, in their midsummer time of putting forth flowers, crowd upon the rambler in the widest forest path with their splendid display. In the swamps of the West Parish of Gloucester, they vie with the magnolias in giving the wildest and most neglected nooks the magnificence of an Eden.

It is delightful to read in Parson Higginson's Journal of his voyage across the Atlantic, bearing the far-back date of 1629, his account of the trees and flowers near and upon our Cape. "On Friday, the 26th of June: The sea was abundantly stored with rockweed and yellow flowers, like gilliflowers. By noon we were within three leagues of Cape Ann; and, as we sailed along the coasts, we saw every hill and dale and every island full of gay woods and high trees. The nearer we

came to the shore, the more flowers in abundance, sometimes scattered abroad, sometimes joined in sheets nine or ten yards long, which we supposed to be brought from the low meadows by the tide. Now what with fine woods and green trees by land, and these yellow flowers painting the sea, made us all desirous to see our new paradise of New England, whence we saw such forerunning signals of fertility afar off." After describing the slow progress of the following day, and much trouble late in the afternoon, because of "a fearful gust of wind and rain and thunder and lightning," "We had a westerly wind, which brought us, between five and six o'clock, to a fine, sweet harbor, seven miles from the headpoint of Cape Ann; where there was an island, whither four of our men with a boat went, and brought back again ripe strawberries and gooseberries, and sweet single roses." When the Sabbath and its rest and worship had passed, and the ship proceeded toward Salem, "It was wonderful to behold so many islands, replenished with thick woods and high trees, and many fair green pastures."

The good parson's particular notice of the "sweet single roses," which were brought to the ship from Ten Pound Island in Gloucester Harbor, as well as his previous observation of the buttercups that floated to the ship's side from Ipswich Bay, was but a hint to his friends in England of the profusion of floral gifts from the Creator's hand