was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of
Brister's Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not
remembered him as a neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his
comrades avoided it as "an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his
old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised
plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken
at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his death,
for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Brister's Spring,
he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades,
and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the
administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even
croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment.
In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been
planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible
shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman
wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit.
The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the
house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would
he want more.

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with
buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries,
hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some
pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a
sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was.
Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry
and tearless grass; or it was covered deep--not to be discovered till
some late day--with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the
race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be--the covering up of
wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar
dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where
once were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, free will,
foreknowledge absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turns
discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just
this, that "Cato and Brister pulled wool"; which is about as edifying as
the history of more famous schools of philosophy.

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel
and the sill are gone, un