There the seasons stopped awhile.  Autumn was gone, Winter was not.  We had Time dealt out to us—­mere, clear, fresh Time—­grace-days to enjoy.  The white wooden farm-houses were banked round two feet deep with dried leaves or earth, and the choppers went out to get ready next year’s stores of wood.  Now, chopping is an art, and the chopper in all respects an artist.  He makes his own axe-helve, and for each man there is but one perfect piece of wood in all the world.  This he never finds, but the likest substitute is trimmed and balanced and poised to that ideal.  One man I know has evolved very nearly the weapon of Umslopogaas.  It is almost straight, lapped at the butt with leather, amazingly springy, and carries a two-edged blade for splitting and chopping.  If his Demon be with him—­and what artist can answer for all his moods?—­he will cause a tree to fall upon any stick or stone that you choose, uphill or down, to the right or to the left.  Artist-like, however, he explains that that is nothing.  Any fool can play with a tree in the open, but it needs the craftsman to bring a tree down in thick timber and do no harm.  To see an eighty-foot maple, four feet in the butt, dropped, deftly as a fly is cast, in the only place where it will not outrage the feelings and swipe off the tops of fifty juniors, is a revelation.  White pine, hemlock, and spruce share this country with maples, black and white birches, and beech.  Maple seems to have few preferences, and the white birches straggle and shiver on the outskirts of every camp; but the pines hold together in solid regiments, sending out skirmishers to invade a neglected pasture on the first opportunity.  There is no overcoat warmer than the pines in a gale when the woods for miles round are singing like cathedral organs, and the first snow of the year powders the rock-ledges.

The mosses and lichens, green, sulphur, and amber, stud the copper floor of needles, where the feathery ground-pine runs aimlessly to and fro along the ground, spelling out broken words of half-forgotten charms.  There are checker-berries on the outskirts of the wood, where the partridge (he is a ruffed grouse really) dines, and by the deserted logging-roads toadstools of all colours sprout on the decayed stumps.  Wherever a green or blue rock lifts from the hillside, the needles have been packed and matted round its base, till, when the sunshine catches them, stone and setting together look no meaner than turquoise in dead gold.  The woods are full of colour, belts and blotches of it, the colours of the savage—­red, yellow, and blue.  Yet in their lodges there is very little life, for the wood-people do not readily go into the shadows.  The squirrels have their business among the beeches and hickories by the road-side, where they can watch the traffic and talk.  We have no gray ones hereabouts (they are good to eat and suffer for it), but five reds live in a hickory hard by, and no weather puts them to sleep.  The