uced into our
picture. The foreground is a cultivated clearing of about one hundred
acres, with woody walls, unbroken in their leafy density, hemming it in
on every side. Directly in front is a field of corn, the dark and
thrifty green of which may well bespeak the deep, rich soil of the
Paradise. Farther in are several other inclosures, either white with
clover or brightly green with blue-grass, or darkly green with the yet
unripened wheat. In the midst of all, and forming the central feature,
stands a cabin, deserted and lowly since that unhappy night two years
ago.

Scattered about the clearing, singly or in clumps, or even in small
groves, are to be seen the giant survivors of the primeval forest,
which, rearing high aloft their green heads and flinging afar their
mighty arms, yield pleasant shade to the horses, sheep, and cattle
grazing about them. But more numerous are to be seen those that are not
survivors, though still standing, drained of their sap of life by the
woodman's ax, which hacked those jagged girdles around their huge
trunks. Standing there leafless, rigid, and gray, they remind us, in
their branching nakedness, of the antlered elk, and in their gigantic
unsightliness of the monstrous mastodon, that thing of grisly bone
which, as a thing of life, no son of Adam ever beheld. Hard by stands an
enormous oak, whose main bough, scathed and deadened by lightning, is
thrust from out its ragged green robe like the extended, unsleeved arm
of a giant, leaving a broad gap in the foliage open to the sky.

Upon this blasted limb of the oak, as if met there to hold an
indignation meeting relative to the scare-crows posted about the field,
or to the objectionable nature of the plowman's music, or to some real
or fancied cause of grievance, have congregated a large assembly of
sober-feathered, sober-visaged, but noisy, wrangling, turbulent crows,
who, like many unfeathered bipeds on the like occasions, seem to have
left their good breeding and good sense at home. Crows and their ways
have always excited much interest in the minds of philosophic men, and
the maneuvers of these before us have been watched with lively curiosity
by our little friend Bushie ever since we began drawing his portrait.

Chapter III.

HOW BIG BLACK BURL AND BUSHIE FIGURED IN EACH OTHER'S EYES.

I spied a jay-bird on a tree,
A ridin' on a swingin' lim';
He cocked his eye an' winked at me,
I cocked my gun an' wi