The woods were fragrant with ripening grapes and decaying vegetation, and were putting on a garb whose flaming splendor surpassed the hues of spring.

Indeed, everything conspired to win a boy or girl away from study or work, and to cause the wish on the part of both that they might be a bird or squirrel, with no thought of the responsibilities of life.

Nellie Ribsam forgot for the time everything else except her own enjoyment; but by-and-by the woods took on such tempting looks that she turned off from the highway she had been following, with the intention of taking a stroll, which she meant should not lead her out of sight of the road.

The first view which stopped her was that of a large vine of wild grapes.

Some of them were green, some turning, while others were a dark purple, showing they were fully ripe:  the last, as a matter of course, were at the top.

These wild grapes were small and tart, inferior to those which grew in the yard of Nellie at home; but they seemed to be trying to hide in the woods, and they were hard to get, therefore they were more to be desired than the choicest Catawba, Isabella, or Concord.

The main vine, where it started from the ground, was as thick as a man’s wrist, and it twisted and wound about an oak sapling as if it were a great African constrictor seeking to strangle the young tree.  Other vines branched out from the sides until not only was the particular sapling enfolded and smothered, but the greedy vine reached out and grasped others growing near it.

Nellie felt like the fox who found the grapes more tempting the longer he looked at them.

“I’m going to have some of them,” she said, and straightway proceeded to help herself.

She climbed as readily as Nick himself could have done, and never stopped until she was so high that the sapling bent far over with her weight.  Then she reached out her chubby hand and plucked a cluster of the wild fruit.  They were about the size of buckshot, and when her sound teeth shut down on them, the juice was so sour that she shut both eyes and felt a twinge at the crown of her head as though she had taken a sniff of the spirits of ammonia.

But the grapes were none the less delicious for all that; the fact that there seemed to be something forbidden about them added a flavor that nothing else could give.

Nellie had managed to crush a handful of the vinegar-like globules, when she caught sight of another vine deeper in the woods.  It was much larger and climbed fully a dozen yards from the ground, winding in and out among the limbs of a ridgy beech, which seemed to be forever struggling upward to get away from the smothering embrace of the vegetable python.

Five minutes later, Nellie was clambering upward like a monkey, never pausing until the bending tree-top warned her that if she went any higher it would yield to her weight.