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Round the house "snake-fences" had given place to those of post and rail; but a few hundred yards away was the uncleared bush. The land thus railed round had been cleared for some years; the grass is good, and the stumps few in number.
They could see the snake-fences about the farms, and the white dusty road like a ribbon and the stumps like black dots, and the waving green tops of the "wood lots" and far away the flash of the River. Thus Bobby gained another of his great desires. Celia proved strangely acquiescent to suggestions for these excursions.
The danger was imminent, the necessity for securing the important position imperative, and without waiting for the order of their superior, or even uttering a word, the whole of the party, acting upon the caution of Collins, made a rush towards the front entrance of the house, which they gained at the very moment when the rattling of the snake-fences, and the total overthrow of the slight enclosure, announced that their enemies were thus near in pursuit.
There were smiling fields with verdant hedgerows between them, unlike the untidy snake-fences of the colonies, and meadows like parks, dotted over with trees, and woods filled with sumach and scarlet maple, and rapid streams hurrying over white pebbles, and villages of green-jalousied houses, with churches and spires, for here all places of worship have spires; and the mellow light of a declining sun streamed over this varied scene of happiness, prosperity, and comfort; and for a moment I thought O traitorous thought! that the New England was fairer than the Old.
However, to ride straight and fast over such a country would be simply impossible; their detestable snake-fences meet you everywhere, with their projecting "zigzags" of loosely-piled rails; you can hardly ever get a chance of taking them in your stride, and they are a fair standing jump with the top bar removed, which generally involves dismounting.
Nor even shall be wanting here The palm, the lily, and the spear, The symbols that of yore Saint Filomena bore. The sun that shines on eastern Massachusetts, specially on buttercups and dandelions, and providentially on potatoes, looks down on no greener fields in these days than it saw in the spring of 1775, fenced in and fenced off by the zigzag snake-fences of 'Zekiel Parsons's farm.
David's, from which, at almost right angles, an irregular branch roadway wound up the Heights. The adjacent table-land west of the village was dotted with farm-houses, partly surrounded by snake-fences and an occasional stone wall. Above Vrooman's he was joined by his two aides.
Noon found Tom far out on the National Road, creaking along over the yellow dust in a light wagon, between bordering forests that smelt spicily of wet underbrush and May-apples; and, here and there, when they would emerge from the woods to cleared fields, liberally outlined by long snake-fences of black walnut, the steady, jog-trotting old horse lifted his head and looked interested in the world, but Tom never did either.
For sixty miles we were passing through woods, the trees sometimes burned and charred for several miles, and the ground all blackened round them. We saw very few clearings, and those there were consisted merely of a few acres of land, separated from the forest by rude "snake-fences."
I turned away from the look-out in utter disgust; a hundred yards off, through the cloud of driving snow-flakes, and a level white mantel, rising up to the tower bars of the snake-fences, merged tillage into pasture undistinguishably. I chronicled that same day as the dreariest of all then remembered Sabbaths.
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