r cease picking stones, I presume, but perhaps I can get
out a permanent injunction against myself, to prevent my buying that
neighboring gravel hill, and so find time to climb my own and sit down
among the beautiful moth-infested oak trees.

I do sit down, and I thrust my idle hands hard into my pockets to keep
them from the Devil who would have them out at the moths instantly--an
evil job, killing moths, worse than picking stones!

Nothing is more difficult to find anywhere than time to sit down with
yourself, except the ability to enjoy the time after finding it,--even
here on a hill in Hingham, if the hill is in woods. There are foes to
face in the city and floods to stem out here, but let no one try to
fight several acres of caterpillars. When you see them coming, climb
your stump and wait on the Lord. He is slow; and the caterpillars are
horribly fast. True. Yet I say. To your stump and wait--and learn
how restful a thing it is to sit down by faith. For the town sprayer
is a vain thing. The roof of green is riddled. The rafters overhead
reach out as naked as in December. Ruin looks through. On sweep the
devouring hosts in spite of arsenate of lead and "wilt" disease and
Calasoma beetles. Nothing will avail; nothing but a new woodlot
planted with saplings that the caterpillars do not eat. Sit still my
soul, and know that when these oak trees fall there will come up the
fir tree and the pine tree and the shagbark, distasteful to the worms;
and they shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that
shall not be cut off.

This is good forestry, and good philosophy--a sure handling of both
worms and soul.

But how hard to follow! I would so like to help the Lord. Not to do
my own share only; but to shoulder the Almighty's too, saying--

"If it were done when 't is done, then 't were well
It were done quickly";

and I up and do it. But it does not stay done. I had sprayed,
creosoted, cut, trimmed, cemented, only to see the trees die, until I
was forced to rest upon the stump, when I saw what I had been blind to
before: that the pine trees were tipped with cones, and that there in
the tops were the red squirrels shucking and giving the winged seeds to
the winds to sow; and that even now up the wooded slope below me, where
the first of the old oaks had perished, was climbing a future grove of
seedling pines.

The forests of Arden are not infested with gypsy moths, nor the woods
of