A HIDE-AND-SEEK TOWN BRIDGE. would pass on, sure that nobody could be living there. No one is living there. Yet, in some one of the rooms sits or lies a woman who is not dead. She is past eighty. When she was a girl she loved a man who loved her sister and not her. Perhaps then, as now, men made love idly, first to one, next to another, even among sisters. At any rate, this girl so loved the man who was to be her sister's husband, that it was known and whispered about. And when the day came for the wedding, the minister being, perhaps, a nervous man and having this poor girl's sad fate much in his thoughts, made the terrible mistake of calling her name instead of her sister's in the ceremony. As soon as the poor creature heard her name she uttered a loud shriek and fled. Strangely enough, no one had the presence of mind to interrupt the minister and set his blunder right, and the bride was actually married, not by her own name, but by her sister's. From that day the sister shunned every one. She insisted that the bridegroom had been married to her; but she wished never again to see a human face. She is past eighty, and has not yet been able to die. Winter before last, in the time of terrible cold, it was noticed for a day or two that no smoke came out of the chimney of this old house. On the fourth day, the neighbors broke open the door and went in. They found the woman lying insensible on the floor, nearly frozen. A few embers were smouldering on the hearth. When they roused her to consciousness, she cursed them fiercely for having disturbed her; but, as the warmth from fire and wine began to steal into her blood, she thanked them; the only words of thankfulness heard from her lips for a half century. After all, she did not want to die! She has relatives who go to the house often and carry her food. She knows their voices, and, after parleying with them a few minutes through the closed door, will open it, take the food, and sometimes allow them to come in. I have twice seen her standing at twilight in the dank shade of her little yard, and fumbling aimlessly at the leaves. of the lilacs. She did not raise her head nor look toward the road, and I dared not speak to her. A gliding shape in a graveyard at midnight would not have seemed half so uncanny, so little of this world. He who stays one month in Hide-andSeek Town, may take each day a new drive and go on no day over a road he has seen before. A person of a statistical turn of mind, who knows the region well, has taken pains to find this out. We are more indebted than we realize to this type of person. Their facts furnish cloth for our fancies to come abroad in. There are souls of such make, that, to them, any one of these roads must seem enough for a summer; for that matter, enough for any number of summers; and in trying to frame a few of their beauties in words, to speak of them by the mile would seem as queer and clumsy, as if one in describing a sunset should pull out his almanac and remind you that there were likely to be three hundred and sixty odd of them in a year. Yet, there is no doubt that to the average mind, the statement that there are thirty different drives in a town, would be more impressive than it would be if one could produce on his page, as on a canvas, a perfect picture of the beauty of one, or even many of its landscapes; to choose which one of the thirty roads one would best try to describe, to win a stranger's care and liking, is as hard as to choose between children. There is such an excelling quality in each. After all, choice here, as elsewhere, is a question of magnetism. Places have their affinities to men, as much gainliness comes to have a sort of pathetic grace; fields of oats and barley and Indian corn and granite boulders, and not an inch as men to each other; and fields and lanes | apple orchards, where the climax of unhave their moods also. I have brought one friend to meet another friend, and neither of them would speak; I have taken a friend to a hill-side, and I myself have perceived. that the hill-side grew dumb and its face clouded. If I may venture, without ever after feeling like a traitor to the rest, to give chief name to one or two of the Hide-and-Seek roads, I would speak of two-one is a highway, the other is a lane. The highway leads in a north-westerly direction to a village on the shore of a lake. It is seven miles long. Three of those miles are through pine woods-"the long woods' they are called with curt literalness by the of roadside all the way which is not thick grown with white clover. Rabbit's foot, Mayweed, shepherd's purse, ferns, blackberry, raspberry, elderberry, and here and there laurel, and in September blue gentians. There is one bit of meadow I recollect on this road. It is set in walls of pines; four little streams zigzag through it. You cross all four on narrow bridges in a space of two or three rods; the strips of meadow and strips of brooks seem braided together into a strand of green and blue, across which is flung your road of gray, bordered with dark alders. This is the way it must look to a bird flying over. The lane is one of many ways to a village on a hill lying west of this town. The road is wide and smooth. riages, perhaps four, might go abreast in it through these pine stretches. There is no fence on either side, and the brown carpet of the fallen pine-needles fringes out to the very ruts of the wheels. Who shall reckon our debt to the pine? It takes such care of us, it must love us, wicked as we are. It builds us roofs; no others keep out sun so well. It spreads a finer than Persian mat under our feet, provides for us endless music and a balsam of healing in the air; then, when it finds us in barren places where bread is hard to get, it loads itself down with cones full of a sweet and wholesome food, and at last, in its death, it makes our very hearthstones ring with its resonant song of cheer and mirth. Before entering these woods you have driven past farms and farmhouses, and meadow lands well tilled; old unpruned THE MEADOW PROCESSION. The hill is so high that, as you look westward, its spires and house-tops stand out against the sky, with not even a tree in the background. In this lane nature has run riot. It is to all the rest of the Hide-and Seek roads what California is to New England. All the trees and plants are millionaires-twenty, thirty per cent. interest on every square foot. One ignorant of botany has no right to open his mouth about it, and only a master of color should go into it to paint. It is an outburst, a tangle, an overflow of greens, of whites, of purples, of yellows; for rods at a time, there are solid knitted and knotted banks of vines on either hand-woodbine, ground nut vine, wild or "false" buckwheat, clivis, green-brier, and wild-grape. The woodbine wreathes the stone walls; the ground-nut vine springs from weed to weed, bush to bush, tree to tree, fantastically looping them all together, and then, at last, leaps off at top of a golden rod or sumac bough, waving a fine spiral taper tendril, a foot long, loose in the air. The false buckwheat, being lightest, gets a-top of the rest and scrambles along fastest, making in July a dainty running arabesque of fine white flowers above everything else. The clivis and the green-brier fill in wherever they can get a corner. They are not so pushing. Then comes the wild grape, lawless master of every situation. There is a spot on this lane where it has smothered and well-nigh killed one young oak, and one young maple and a sumac thicket. They have their heads out still, and very beautiful they look-the shining jagged-edged oak-leaves, and the pointed maples, and the slender sumacs waving above and in the matted canopies of the grape; but they will never be trees. The grape vine is strongest. This lane leads over high hill-crests, from which you have ever-changing views-now wide sweeps to the south horizon, now dainty and woodframed bits of near valleys or lakes, now GLIMPSES FROM THE LANE. outcropping granite ledges and spots strewn thick with granite bowlders, as grand and stony as Stonehenge itself. Now the lane dips down into hollows in woods so thick, that for rods the branches more than meet over your head; then it turns a corner and suddenly fades away in the queer front-door yard of a farm-house flanked by orchards and corn fields; then it dips again into a deeper hollow and denser wood, with thick undergrowths, which brush your wheels like hands thrust out to hold you back; then it comes out on a meadow stretch, where the lines of alders and milk-weeds, and eupatoriums and asters, border it so close, that you may pick on any September day your hands full of flowers, if you like, by merely leaning out of your carriage; not only flowers, but ferns, high three-branched brakes and graceful ostrich plume ferns, you can reach from your seat. These are but glimpses I have given of any chance half mile on this lane. There are myriads of beautiful lesser things all along it whose names I do not know, but whose faces are as familiar as if I had been born in the lane and had never gone away. There are also numberless pictures which come crowding-of spots and nooks, and pictures on other roads and lanes in this rarest of regions. No one who knows and loves summer, can summer in Hideand-Seek Town without bearing away such pictures; if he neither knows nor loves summer-if he have only a retina, and not a soul, he must, perforce, recollect some of them. A certain bridge, for instance, three planks wide, under which goes a brook so deep, so dark, it shines not like water, but like a burnished shield. It comes out from a wood, and in the black shadow of the trees along the edge of the brook stand, in August, scarlet cardinal flowers, ranks on ranks, two feet high, reflected in the burnished shield as in a glass; or a meadow there is which is walled on three sides by high woods, and has a procession of tall bulrushes forever sauntering through it with lazy spears and round-handled halberds, points down, and hundreds of yellow sunflowers looking up and down in the grass; or a wood there is which has all of a sudden, in its center, a great cleared space, where ferns have settled themselves as in a tropic, and grown into solid thickets and jungles in the darkness; or another, which has along the road-side for many rods an unbroken line of light-green feathery ferns; so close set it seems, that not one more could have grown up without breaking down a neighbor; under these a velvety line of pine-tree moss, and the moss dotted thick with "wintergreen" in flower and in fruit; or a lake with three sides of soft woods or fields, and the fourth side an unbroken forest slope two thousand feet up the north wall of the mountain. These are a few which come first to my thought; others crowd on, but I force memory and fancy together back into the strait-jacket of the statistical person, and content myself with repeating that there are thirty different drives in Hide-and Seek Town! Next winter, however, memory and fancy will have their way; and as we sit cowering over fires and the snow piles up outside our window sills, we shall gaze dreamily into the glowing coals, and, living the summer over again, shall recall it in a minuteness of joy, for which summer days were too short, and summer light too strong. Then, when joy becomes reverie, and reverie takes shape, a truer record can be written, and its first page shall be called A ROAD-SIDE. I. WHITE CLOVER. In myriad snowy chalices of sweet Although all summer long I quaff thy wine, II. WILD GRAPE. Thou gypsy camper, how camest thou here, III. MILKWEED. O, patient creature with a peasant face, And, crowding eagerly, sink fluttering down, |