k again.

"Miss Lizzie, he don't know nothin' and he wants to know a
heap. Do you want him to cut down a cedar, he says, or an oak,
or somethin' else. There's the most cedars, he says; but Karen
says they snap all to pieces."

Elizabeth rose to her feet.

"I suppose I can find a tree in a minute that he can cut
without doing any harm. -- Bring me a parasol, Clam, -- and come
along with me."

Clam and the parasol came out at one door, and Anderese and
his axe at another, as Elizabeth slowly paced towards the
house. The three joined company. Anderese was an old grey-
haired negro, many years younger however than his sister.
Elizabeth asked him, "Which way?"

"Which way the young lady pleases."

"I don't please about it," said Elizabeth, -- "I don't know
anything about it -- lead to the nearest place -- where a tree
can be soonest found."

The old man shouldered his axe and went before, presently
entering a little wood path; of which many struck off into the
leafy wilderness which bordered the house. Leaves overhead,
rock and moss under foot; a winding, jagged, up and down,
stony, and soft green way, sometimes the one, sometimes the
other. Elizabeth's bible was still in her hand, her finger
still kept it open at the second chapter of Matthew; she went
musingly along over grey lichens and sunny green beds of moss,
thinking of many things. How she was wandering in Winthrop's
old haunts, where the trees had once upon a time been cut by
him, she now to order the cutting of the fellow trees. Strange
it was! How she was desolate and alone, nobody but herself
there to do it; her father gone; and she without another
protector or friend to care for the trees or her either. There
were times when the weight of pain, like the pressure of the
atmosphere, seemed so equally distributed that it was
distinctly felt nowhere, -- or else so mighty that the nerves
of feeling were benumbed. Elizabeth wandered along in a kind
of maze, half wondering half indignant at herself that she
could walk and think at all. She did not execute much
thinking, to do her justice; she passed through the sweet
broken sunlight and still shadows, among the rough trunks of
the cedars, as if it had been the scenery of dreamland. On
every hand were up-shooting young pines, struggling oaks that
were caught in thickets of cedar, and ashes and elms that were
humbly asking leave to spread and see the light and reach
their heads up to freedom and free air. T