It had been nearly twenty years since I crossed this pasture of the cedars on my way to the persimmon trees.  The cows had been crossing every year, yet not a single new crook had they worn in the old paths.  But I was half afraid as I came to the fence where I could look down upon the pond and over to the persimmon trees.  Not one of the Luptons, who owned pasture and pond and trees, had ever been a boy, so far as I could remember, or had ever eaten of those persimmons.  Would they have left the trees through all these years?

I pushed through the hedge of cedars and stopped for an instant, confused.  The very pond was gone! and the trees!  No, there was the pond,—­but how small the patch of water! and the two persimmon trees?  The bush and undergrowth had grown these twenty years.  Which way—­Ah, there they stand, only their leafless tops showing; but see the hard angular limbs, how closely globed with fruit! how softly etched upon the sky!

I hurried around to the trees and climbed the one with the two broken branches, up, clear up to the top, into the thick of the persimmons.

Did I say it had been twenty years?  That could not be.  Twenty years would have made me a man, and this sweet, real taste in my mouth only a boy could know.  But there was college, and marriage, a Massachusetts farm, four boys of my own, and—­no matter! it could not have been years—­twenty years—­since.  It was only yesterday that I last climbed this tree and ate the rich rimy fruit frosted with a Christmas snow.

And yet, could it have been yesterday?  It was storming, and I clung here in the swirling snow and heard the wild ducks go over in their hurry toward the bay.  Yesterday, and all this change in the vast treetop world, this huddled pond, those narrowed meadows, that shrunken creek!  I should have eaten the persimmons and climbed straight down, not stopped to gaze out upon the pond, and away over the dark ditches to the creek.  But reaching out quickly I gathered another handful,—­and all was yesterday again.

I filled both pockets of my coat and climbed down.  I kept those persimmons and am tasting them to-night.  Lupton’s Pond may fill to a puddle, the meadows may shrivel, the creek dry up and disappear, and old Time may even try his wiles on me.  But I shall foil him to the end; for I am carrying still in my pocket some of yesterday’s persimmons,—­persimmons that ripened in the rime of a winter when I was a boy.

High and alone in a bare persimmon tree for one’s dinner hardly sounds like a merry Christmas.  But I was not alone.  I had noted the fresh tracks beneath the tree before I climbed up, and now I saw that the snow had been partly brushed from several of the large limbs as the ’possum had moved about in the tree for his Christmas dinner.  We were guests at the same festive board, and both of us at Nature’s invitation.  It mattered not that the ’possum had eaten and gone this hour or more.  Such is good form in the woods.  He was expecting me, so he came early, out of modesty; and, that I too might be entirely at my ease, he departed early, leaving his greetings for me in the snow.