rees and seclusion--a spot for a summer tent.

There were not many mushrooms any more, but we gathered gay red berries
for decoration, bunches of late fern, sprays of bittersweet; we raked
over the leaves for nuts, and sometimes found bits of spicy wintergreen
or checkerberry, the kind that always flavored old-fashioned lozenges
which our grandmothers bought in little rolls for a penny, on the way to
school. You may guess that this was pleasant play to us who for ten
years had known only city or suburban life at this season, and not the
least pleasant part of it was the quiet noise the leaves made as we
strode through them, the _fruis-sas-se-ar_, as the French of the
Provence call it, and the word as they speak it conveys the sound.
Astride a stick horse, of which on our new back porch she kept a full
stable, the Joy went racing this way and that, kicking high the loose
brown drift of summer, stirred to a sort of ecstasy by its pleasant
noise and the spicy autumn air.

The November woods had fewer voices than those of the earlier season,
but there was more visible life. Many of the birds remained, and they
could no longer hide so easily. A hawk or an owl on a bare bough was
sharply outlined. Rabbits darted among the trees, or stood erect,
staring at us with questioning eyes. Squirrels scampering over the limbs
gave exhibitions of acrobatic skill. There were two kinds of
squirrels--the fat gray ones, of which there were not many, and the
venomous little red ones, of which there seemed an overproduction. They
were cute little wretches, but we did not care for them. They were
pugnacious pirates; they robbed their unmilitant gray relative and
chased him from the premises. Earlier in the season they had thrown down
quantities of green nuts to be wasted, and we were told they robbed
birds' nests, not only of their eggs, but of their young. Those red
rovers had no food value, or they would have been fewer. They were a
mere furry skin drawn over a bunch of wires and strings, and not worth a
charge of powder.

V

_Deer--wild deer--on our own farm!_

Animal life is still plentiful in New England--far more so than in the
newer states of the Middle West. With the decrease of population in many
districts the wild things have wandered back to their old haunts. They
are not very persistently hunted, and some of them, like the deer, are
protected. Now and again in our walks we saw a fox, wary and
silent-footed, and often on sha