and snaky cat-briers,
with their retractile thorns and vicious clinging grasp,--now dashing
along the woodman's paths,--now struggling among the opposing
underwood. At last a little sprig of feathery green catches the eye.
It is a tuft of moss. No,--it is the running ground-pine; and clearing
away, with both eager hands, leaves, sticks, moss, and all the fallen
_exuciae_ of the summertime, you tear up long wreaths of that most
graceful of evergreens. Then, in another quarter of the woodland, where
the underbrush has been killed by the denser shade, there rise the
exquisite fan-shaped plumes of the feather-pine, of deepest green, or
brown-golden with the pencil of the frost;--for cross or star or thick
festoon, there is nothing so beautiful. And again you are attracted
into the thickets of laurel, and wage fierce war upon the sturdy and
tenacious, yet brittle branches, till you are transformed into a walking
jack-o'-the-green. The holly of the English Christmas, all-besprent with
crimson drops, is hard to be found in New England, and you will have to
thread the courses of the brooks to seek the swamp-loving black alder,
which will furnish as brilliant a berry, but without the beautiful
thorny leaf. Only in one patch of woodland do I know of the holly. In
the southeastern corner of Massachusetts,--if you will take the trouble
to follow up a railroad-track for a couple of miles and then plunge
into the pine woods, you will come upon a few lonely, stunted scraps of
it. The warmer airs which the Gulf Stream sends upon that coast have,
it is said, something to do therewith. Of course, if I am wrong, the
botanists will take vengeance upon me; but I can only say what has been
said to me. We nemophilists are apt to be careless of solemn science and
go upon all sorts of uncertain tradition.

But "Christmas comes but once a year." After chancel and nave have been
duly adorned, and again disrobed against the coming sobrieties of Lent,
there are other temptations to the woods. Before the snow has wholly
vanished from the shelter of the wood-lots, the warm, hazy, wooing days
of April come upon us. On such a day,--how well in this snow-season I
remember it!--I have been lured out by the hope of the Mayflower, the
delicate _epigae repens_, miscalled the trailing arbutus. Up the rocky
hill-side, from whose top you catch glimpses of the far-off sparkling
sea, with a blue haze of island ranges belting it,--up among the rocks,
into warm, s