whish, as it does the duty of street-door-mat to your mud-beclogged sandals.  Now for the stone wall.  On the other side are thick set the thorny stalks of last summer’s “high-bush” blackberries.  A plunge and a scramble take you through in comparative safety; and stopping only to disengage your skirts from a too-fond bramble, you are in the woodland.  Thick-strewn the dead leaves lie under foot.  What music there is in the rustling murmur with which they greet your invading step!  On, deeper and deeper into the wood,—­now dodging under the green and snaky cat-briers, with their retractile thorns and vicious clinging grasp,—­now dashing along the woodman’s paths,—­now struggling among the opposing underwood.  At last a little sprig of feathery green catches the eye.  It is a tuft of moss.  No,—­it is the running ground-pine; and clearing away, with both eager hands, leaves, sticks, moss, and all the fallen exuciae of the summertime, you tear up long wreaths of that most graceful of evergreens.  Then, in another quarter of the woodland, where the underbrush has been killed by the denser shade, there rise the exquisite fan-shaped plumes of the feather-pine, of deepest green, or brown-golden with the pencil of the frost;—­for cross or star or thick festoon, there is nothing so beautiful.  And again you are attracted into the thickets of laurel, and wage fierce war upon the sturdy and tenacious, yet brittle branches, till you are transformed into a walking jack-o’-the-green.  The holly of the English Christmas, all-besprent with crimson drops, is hard to be found in New England, and you will have to thread the courses of the brooks to seek the swamp-loving black alder, which will furnish as brilliant a berry, but without the beautiful thorny leaf.  Only in one patch of woodland do I know of the holly.  In the southeastern corner of Massachusetts,—­if you will take the trouble to follow up a railroad-track for a couple of miles and then plunge into the pine woods, you will come upon a few lonely, stunted scraps of it.  The warmer airs which the Gulf Stream sends upon that coast have, it is said, something to do therewith.  Of course, if I am wrong, the botanists will take vengeance upon me; but I can only say what has been said to me.  We nemophilists are apt to be careless of solemn science and go upon all sorts of uncertain tradition.

But “Christmas comes but once a year.”  After chancel and nave have been duly adorned, and again disrobed against the coming sobrieties of Lent, there are other temptations to the woods.  Before the snow has wholly vanished from the shelter of the wood-lots, the warm, hazy, wooing days of April come upon us.  On such a day,—­how well in this snow-season I remember it!—­I have been lured out by the hope of the Mayflower, the delicate epigae repens, miscalled the trailing arbutus.  Up the rocky hill-side, from whose top you catch glimpses of the far-off sparkling sea, with a blue haze of island ranges belting it,—­up among the rocks,