cinating. The tall pine-trees whispering to each other across the
sky-openings above me, the graceful ferns, the velvet mosses dotted
with scarlet fairy-cups, as if the elves had just spread their table
for tea, the unspeakable charm of the spice-breathing air, all wove a
web of enchantment about me, from which I had no wish to disentangle
myself. The silent spell of the woods held me with a power stronger
even than that of the solemn-voiced sea. Sometimes this same brother
would get permission to take me on a longer excursion,--to visit the
old homestead at "The Farms." Three or four miles was not thought too
long a walk for a healthy child of five years; and that road, in the
old time, led through a rural Paradise, beautiful at every
season,--whether it were the time of song-sparrows and violets, of wild
roses, of coral-hung barberry-bushes, or of fallen leaves and
snow-drifts. The wildness of the road, now exchanged for elegant modern
cultivation, was its great charm to us. We stopped at the Cove Brook to
hear the cat-birds sing, and at Mingo's Beach to revel in the sudden
surprise of the open sea, and to listen to the chant of the waves,
always stronger and grander there than anywhere along the shore. We
passed under dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of
which held under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest
woodpath to us in all the world, the path to the ancestral farmhouse.

We found children enough to play with there,--as numerous a family as
our own. We were sometimes, I fancy, the added drop too much of already
overflowing juvenility. Farther down the road, where the cousins were
all grown-up men and women, Aunt Betsey's cordial, old-fashioned
hospitality sometimes detained us a day or two. We watched the milking,
and fed the chickens, and fared gloriously. Aunt Betsey could not have
done more to entertain us, had we been the President's children.

I have always cherished the memory of a certain pair of large-bowed
spectacles that she wore, and of the green calash, held by a ribbon
bridle, that sheltered her head, when she walked up from the shore to
see us, as she often did. They announced to us the approach of
inexhaustible kindliness and good cheer. We took in a home-feeling with
the words "Aunt Betsey" then and always. She had just the husband that
belonged to her in my Uncle David, an upright man, frank-faced,
large-hearted, and spiritually minded. He was my father's favorite