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But being bound in honor to tell the whole moral or no moral, I must add, that while Sharley walked and thought among her hickories there came up a thunder-storm. It fell upon her without any warning. The sky had been clear when she looked at it last. It gaped at her now out of the throats of purple-black clouds. Thunders crashed over and about her. All the forest darkened and reeled.
"Certain," said Si, as he handed his gun, cartridge-box, haversack, blanket-roll and overcoat to another boy to carry for him, shouldered his ax and started off at a run, the others following. They came back to the spot whither the old man had led them. Si's experienced eye quickly selected two tall hickories, which could be felled directly across the stream and form the stringers for his bridge.
The great hillsides with their tracts of timber that looked as if they fenced in the world when the sun dropped down behind them, but if one threaded one's way through the dark aisles and came out on the other side there were wonderful pictures, small prairies or levels that suggested lakes and then a sort of avenue stretching out until another was visible, undulating surfaces, groves of pine, burr oak, and great stalwart hickories, then another woody ridge, and so on and on through interminable tangles and over rivers until Lake Michigan was reached.
It was now two weeks since they had returned from Quantuck, and the year was at the fall of the leaf. The Savins was covered with a thick carpet of golden brown, and the birches and hickories were blazing with gold, while the corner house was set in a nest of crimson and yellow and scarlet maples.
She could imagine just how it looked at home, the green lawn heaped here and there with brown oak leaves, the golden glory of the hickories, the masses of late chrysanthemums, red and white and pink and yellow, filling every sheltered nook and corner, above it all, the soft November haze which is neither rosy nor purple nor gold, but blended from them all, yet quieter far than any one of them.
The willows were in perfect leaf, and wore their delicate green like veils caught upon their boughs; the may-apples had already pitched their tents in the woods, beginning to thicken and darken with the young foliage of the oaks and hickories; suddenly, as the train dashed from a stretch of forest, the peach orchards flushed pink beside the brick farmsteads.
The house was likely to have a quiet dignity of its own; but most of such beauty as the homestead possessed was contributed by the canopy of live-oaks if on the rice or sugar coasts, or of oaks, hickories or cedars, if in the uplands.
Indeed, neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries' shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more Red Maples, and some Hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is very imperfectly filled.
The first-growth timber on the west woodlot for some time had staved off the need of a mortgage; its veteran oaks and hickories grimly giving up their lives, in hundreds, to keep the wolf from the door of their owner.
If you live in the country, I can show you an old Woodcraft trick. Look for a hollow tree. Sometimes you can pick one out afar, by the dead top, and sometimes by noting a tree that had lost one of the biggest limbs years ago. In any case, basswoods, old oaks and chestnuts are apt to be hollow; while hickories and elms are seldom so, for once they yield to decay at all, they go down.
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