United States or Croatia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Such companions befit the season of frosted window-panes and crackling fires, when the blast howls through the black-ash trees of our avenue and the drifting snow- storm chokes up the wood-paths and fills the highway from stone wall to stone wall. In the spring and summer time all sombre thoughts should follow the winter northward with the sombre and thoughtful crows.
I suggested some currants for sauce, especially as they had no apple-trees set out, and showed how easily they could be obtained. There was the usual long-handled axe of the primitive woods by the door, three and a half feet long, for my new black-ash rule was in constant use, and a large, shaggy dog, whose nose, report said, was full of porcupine quills. I can testify that he looked very sober.
But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor, each a wild man in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the nature of the occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the only 'call' in which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved. "In Mr. Emerson's house I said it seemed always morning. But Hawthorne's black-ash trees and scraggy apple boughs shaded
But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor, each a wild man in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the nature of the occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the only "call" in which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved. In Mr. Emerson's house, I said, it seemed always morning. But Hawthorne's black-ash trees and scraggy apple-boughs shaded
He has himself drawn the picture of it, and given us an exquisite collection of "Mosses" from it. It lay back from the main road, and was approached by an avenue of ancient black-ash trees, whose deep shade added much to the quiet appearance of "the gray front of the old parsonage." It was just the home for him, and here passed three of the happiest years of his life.
And slowly the bulk of the water, thus raised a good three feet above its former level, turned aside into the new channel and poured out to inundate the black-ash swamp beyond. A good volume still poured over the top of the temporary dam and down to the fall; but it was by this expedient so far reduced that work became possible. "Now, boys!" cried Orde. "Lively, while we've got the chance!"
The forest which covers it, consisting chiefly of white-cedar, black-ash, and other trees that live in excessive moisture, is now decayed and death-struck by the partial draining of the swamp into the great ditch of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our lights were reflected from pools of stagnant water which stretched far in among the trunks of the trees, beneath dense masses of dark foliage.
He cleared the land and built a log house with a black-ash bark roof, and a great stone chimney, and a floor of hewn logs. Grandmother said it was the happiest day of her life when she found herself the mistress of this little house in the woods. Great-grandmother Avery lived with them later. She had a petulant disposition.
As is often the case in bends of rivers subject to annual floods, the banks sloped back for some distance into a lower black-ash swamp territory. Orde set his men to digging a channel through this bank. It was no slight job, from one point of view, as the slope down into the swamp began only at a point forty or fifty feet inland; but on the other hand the earth was soft and free from rocks.
Sometimes, in cloudy weather, I was lost and it looked to me as though they were going the wrong way, but I followed them, through black-ash swales where the water was knee-deep, sometimes nearly barefooted. I always carried a gun, sometimes father's rifle. The deer didn't seem to be afraid of the cattle; they would stand and look at them as they passed not seeming to notice me.
Word Of The Day