aves,--barks of a
nobler model still!

What wholesome herb-drinks are to be had in the swamps now! What strong
medicinal, but rich, scents from the decaying leaves! The rain falling
on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and filling the pools and ditches
into which they have dropped thus clean and rigid, will soon convert
them into tea,--green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of all degrees of
strength, enough to set all Nature a-gossiping. Whether we drink them or
not, as yet, before their strength is drawn, these leaves, dried on
great Nature's coppers, are of such various pure and delicate tints as
might make the fame of Oriental teas.

How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and Maple and Chestnut and
Birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect
husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus
annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is
the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth with
interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting. They are
about to add a leaf's thickness to the depth of the soil. This is the
beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I chaffer with this
man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of carting. We
are all the richer for their decay. I am more interested in this crop
than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin
mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. It
keeps our homestead in good heart.

For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not
merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we
know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing Maple, the
Poison-Sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry Ash, the rich
chrome-yellow of the Poplars, the brilliant red Huckleberry, with which
the hills' backs are painted, like those of sheep. The frost touches
them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or jarring of
earth's axle, see in what showers they come floating down! The ground is
all party-colored with them. But they still live in the soil, whose
fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from
it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by subtle
chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the sapling's first
fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in
after-years, it has become the m