eaf-mould
rife with ferns and wild flowers.

From its business quarter the town's chief street of residence, Elm
Street, begins a gently winding westerly ascent to become an open
high-road from one to another of the several farming and manufacturing
villages that use the water-power of Mill River. But while it is still a
street there runs from it southerly at a right angle a straight bit of
avenue some three hundred yards long--an exceptional length of unbent
street for Northampton. This short avenue ends at another, still
shorter, lying square across its foot within some seventy yards of that
suddenly falling wooded and broken ground where Mill River loiters
through Paradise. The strip of land between the woods and this last
street is taken up by half a dozen dwellings of modest dignity, whose
front shade-trees, being on the southerly side, have been placed not on
the sidewalk's roadside edge but on the side next the dwellings and
close within their line of private ownership: red, white and post-oaks
set there by the present writer when he named the street "Dryads'
Green." They are now twenty-one years old and give a good shade which
actually falls where it is wanted--upon the sidewalk.

[Illustration: " ... that suddenly falling wooded and broken ground
where Mill River loiters through Paradise."

A strong wire fence (invisible in the picture) here divides the _grove_
from the old river road.]

On this green of the dryads, where it intercepts the "avenue" that slips
over from the Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my own acre;
house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the rear, in the edge of the pines, the
study. Back there by the study--which sometimes in irony we call the
power-house--the lawn merges into my seven other acres, in Paradise.
Really the whole possession is a much humbler one than I find myself
able to make it appear in the flattering terms of land measure. Those
seven acres of Paradise I acquired as "waste land." Nevertheless, if I
were selling that "waste," that "hole in the ground," it would not hurt
my conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds on it alone are
worth more than it cost: wood-thrushes and robins, golden orioles,
scarlet tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds,
veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, the
cuckoo, the nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, not
to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, the littl