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The buffalo was the stand-by of the settlers; they used his flesh as their common food, and his robe for covering; they made moccasins of his hide and fiddle-strings of his sinews, and combs of his horns. They spun his winter coat into yarn, and out of it they made coarse cloth, like wool. They made a harsh linen from the bark of the rotted nettles. They got sugar from the maples.
The silver poplars were masses of soft gray bloom, and the willows down toward the river seemed to have slipped off their old bark and on their new in a single night. The soft maples, too, when massed in the distance, their tops deeply dyed in a bright maroon color, how fair they looked! The 15th of the month was "one of those charmed days when the genius of God doth flow."
"He lives up in the big house on the bluff, where the pine and maples are." The old woman shook her head placidly. "I not go up that bluff in forty-eight year." Kit's eyes widened with quick interest. Just then a girl a little older than herself came out of the kitchen door. Two long braids of straight brown hair hung over her shoulders, and her dress was slouchy and gypsy-like.
It sat well back from the wide boulevard, and, surrounded as it was by fine old elms and beeches and maples, it reminded me of some antiquated English country home, such as I have seen in pictures. There were any number of chimney clusters; but the general air of the place was extremely cold and forbidding.
These sugar-maple blooms hang on slender stems; they come with the first leaves, and are very different in appearance from the flowers of other maples.
Young maples and elms, already nibbled by the cows, grew beside the paths, drawn up and hindering each other's growth. The garden was thickly overgrown and seemed impassable, but this was only near the house where there stood poplars, fir-trees, and old limetrees, all of the same age, relics of the former avenues.
On them grew maples and birches, among which scattered a few hemlocks and an occasional pine. At the edge of the water were cedars leaning out to look at their reflections. A deep and solemn peace seemed to brood over the miniature lake. Such affairs as bird songs, the slap of a paddle, the shots from Dick's rifle could not break this strange stillness.
We did not ascend the spotless front porch to assault its innocent white door, but turned aside on a narrow-gauge branch of the gravelled pathway and came to a side porch, shaded by maples. And here, in strict conformity to the soundest behests of tradition, sat two entirely genuine Arcadians in wooden rocking-chairs.
May came, and the pools dried up, the orchards were pink and white, the birches and the maples were all yellow-green on the mountain sides against the dark pines, and Cynthia was driving the minister's gig to Brampton. Ahead of her, in the canon made by the road between the great woods, strode an uncouth but powerful figure coonskin cap, homespun breeches tucked into boots, and all.
It was of gray stone, massive and forbidding and iron barred. Clark stopped here for a moment and looked back at St. Marys with its flaming maples and its scattered roofs from which rose plumes of light, gray smoke.
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