owners of this corner of New England are the only proper figures to paint into such landscapes.  The twilight under tall pines seems to be untenanted and to lack something, at first sight, as if one opened the door of an empty house.  A farmer passing through with his axe is but an intruder, and children straying home from school give one a feeling of solicitude at their unprotectedness.  The pine woods are the red man’s house, and it may be hazardous even yet for the gray farmhouses to stand so near the eaves of the forest.  I have noticed a distrust of the deep woods, among elderly people, which was something more than a fear of losing their way.  It was a feeling of defenselessness against some unrecognized but malicious influence.

Driving through the long woodland way, shaded and chilly when you are out of the sun; across the Great Works River and its pretty elm-grown intervale; across the short bridges of brown brooks; delayed now and then by the sight of ripe strawberries in sunny spots by the roadside, one comes to a higher open country, where farm joins farm, and the cleared fields lie all along the highway, while the woods are pushed back a good distance on either hand.  The wooded hills, bleak here and there with granite ledges, rise beyond.  The houses are beside the road, with green door-yards and large barns, almost empty now, and with wide doors standing open, as if they were already expecting the hay crop to be brought in.  The tall green grass is waving in the fields as the wind goes over, and there is a fragrance of whiteweed and ripe strawberries and clover blowing through the sunshiny barns, with their lean sides and their festoons of brown, dusty cobwebs; dull, comfortable creatures they appear to imaginative eyes, waiting hungrily for their yearly meal.  The eave-swallows are teasing their sleepy shapes, like the birds which flit about great beasts; gay, movable, irreverent, almost derisive, those barn swallows fly to and fro in the still, clear air.

The noise of our wheels brings fewer faces to the windows than usual, and we lose the pleasure of seeing some of our friends who are apt to be looking out, and to whom we like to say good-day.  Some funeral must be taking place, or perhaps the women may have gone out into the fields.  It is hoeing-time and strawberry-time, and already we have seen some of the younger women at work among the corn and potatoes.  One sight will be charming to remember.  On a green hillside sloping to the west, near one of the houses, a thin little girl was working away lustily with a big hoe on a patch of land perhaps fifty feet by twenty.  There were all sorts of things growing there, as if a child’s fancy had made the choice,—­straight rows of turnips and carrots and beets, a little of everything, one might say; but the only touch of color was from a long border of useful sage in full bloom of dull blue, on the upper side.  I am sure this was called Katy’s or Becky’s piece