s poor and stony soil elaborates and grows so many
delicate and aromatic products.

John, it is true, did not care much for anything that did not appeal to
his taste and smell and delight in brilliant color; and he trod down the
exquisite ferns and the wonderful mosses--without compunction. But he
gathered from the crevices of the rocks the columbine and the eglantine
and the blue harebell; he picked the high-flavored alpine strawberry,
the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants and gooseberries, and
fox-grapes; he brought home armfuls of the pink-and-white laurel and the
wild honeysuckle; he dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras and of
the sweet-flag; he ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen and its red
berries; he gathered the peppermint and the spearmint; he gnawed
the twigs of the black birch; there was a stout fern which he called
"brake," which he pulled up, and found that the soft end "tasted good;"
he dug the amber gum from the spruce-tree, and liked to smell, though he
could not chew, the gum of the wild cherry; it was his melancholy duty
to bring home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold-thread,
the tansy, and the loathsome "boneset;" and he laid in for the winter,
like a squirrel, stores of beechnuts, hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts,
chestnuts, and butternuts. But that which lives most vividly in his
memory and most strongly draws him back to the New England hills is the
aromatic sweet-fern; he likes to eat its spicy seeds, and to crush in
his hands its fragrant leaves; their odor is the unique essence of New
England.

XVI. JOHN'S REVIVAL.

The New England country-boy of the last generation never heard of
Christmas. There was no such day in his calendar. If John ever came
across it in his reading, he attached no meaning to the word.

If his curiosity had been aroused, and he had asked his elders about
it, he might have got the dim impression that it was a kind of Popish
holiday, the celebration of which was about as wicked as "card-playing,"
or being a "Democrat." John knew a couple of desperately bad boys who
were reported to play "seven-up" in a barn, on the haymow, and the
enormity of this practice made him shudder. He had once seen a pack of
greasy "playing-cards," and it seemed to him to contain the quintessence
of sin. If he had desired to defy all Divine law and outrage all human
society, he felt that he could do it by shuffling them. And he was quite
right. The two bad boys enjoyed