the sweet-flag; he ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen and its red berries; he gathered the peppermint and the spearmint; he gnawed the twigs of the black birch; there was a stout fern which he called “brake,” which he pulled up, and found that the soft end “tasted good;” he dug the amber gum from the spruce-tree, and liked to smell, though he could not chew, the gum of the wild cherry; it was his melancholy duty to bring home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold-thread, the tansy, and the loathsome “boneset;” and he laid in for the winter, like a squirrel, stores of beechnuts, hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts, chestnuts, and butternuts.  But that which lives most vividly in his memory and most strongly draws him back to the New England hills is the aromatic sweet-fern; he likes to eat its spicy seeds, and to crush in his hands its fragrant leaves; their odor is the unique essence of New England.

XVI

JOHN’S REVIVAL

The New England country-boy of the last generation never heard of Christmas.  There was no such day in his calendar.  If John ever came across it in his reading, he attached no meaning to the word.

If his curiosity had been aroused, and he had asked his elders about it, he might have got the dim impression that it was a kind of Popish holiday, the celebration of which was about as wicked as “card-playing,” or being a “Democrat.”  John knew a couple of desperately bad boys who were reported to play “seven-up” in a barn, on the haymow, and the enormity of this practice made him shudder.  He had once seen a pack of greasy “playing-cards,” and it seemed to him to contain the quintessence of sin.  If he had desired to defy all Divine law and outrage all human society, he felt that he could do it by shuffling them.  And he was quite right.  The two bad boys enjoyed in stealth their scandalous pastime, because they knew it was the most wicked thing they could do.  If it had been as sinless as playing marbles, they would n’t have cared for it.  John sometimes drove past a brown, tumble-down farmhouse, whose shiftless inhabitants, it was said, were card-playing people; and it is impossible to describe how wicked that house appeared to John.  He almost expected to see its shingles stand on end.  In the old New England one could not in any other way so express his contempt of all holy and orderly life as by playing cards for amusement.

There was no element of Christmas in John’s life, any more than there was of Easter; and probably nobody about him could have explained Easter; and he escaped all the demoralization attending Christmas gifts.  Indeed, he never had any presents of any kind, either on his birthday or any other day.  He expected nothing that he did not earn, or make in the way of “trade” with another boy.  He was taught to work for what he received.  He even earned, as I said, the extra holidays of the day after the Fourth and the day after Thanksgiving.  Of the free grace and gifts of Christmas he had no conception.  The single and melancholy association he had with it was the quaking hymn which his grandfather used to sing in a cracked and quavering voice: