everal deer are seen crossing the field just a
little distance from the house. They like to drink at the brooks and
nip off the buds of the lilac trees. Foxes, alas, abound.

Pheasants, quail, partridges are quite tame, perhaps because we feed
them in winter.

I found untold bushes of the blueberry and huckleberry, also enough
cranberries in the swamp to supply our own table and sell some. Wild
grape-vines festoon trees by the brooks.

Barberries, a dozen bushes of these which are very decorative, and
their fruit if skilfully mixed with raisins make a foreign-tasting and
delicious conserve.

We have the otter and mink, and wild ducks winter in our brooks. Large
birds like the heron and rail appear but rarely; ugly looking and
fierce.

The hateful English sparrow has been so reduced in numbers by sparrow
traps that now they keep away and the bluebirds take their own boxes
again. The place is a safe and happy haven for hosts of birds.

I have a circle of houses for the martins and swallows and wires
connecting them, where a deal of gossip goes on.

The pigeons coo-oo-o on the barn roof and are occasionally utilized in
a pie, good too!

[Illustration: GRAND ELM
(OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD)]

"I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer."

"Where are your trees, Sir?" said the divinity student.

"Oh, all around about New England. I call all trees mine that I
have put my wedding ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as
Brigham Young has human ones." "One set's as green as the
other," exclaimed a boarder, who has never been identified.
"They're all Bloomers,"--said the young fellow called John. (I
should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our
landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by
putting my wedding-ring on a tree.) "Why, measuring it with my
thirty-foot tape, my dear, said I.--I have worn a tape almost
out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and other
big trees. Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little now?
That is one of my specialties."

"What makes a first-class elm?"

"Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly anything over
twenty feet clear girth five feet above the ground and with a
spread of branches a hundred feet across may claim that title,
according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable
exception of the Springfield tree ab