see how it gets its living, why it will grow on one side of a brook in
profusion, and yet refuse to seek the other bank, is not his care. It
is simply to see whether he can abuse its honest English or New-English
simplicity by calling it by one set or another of barbarous Latin and
Greek titles. Pray, my good Sir, does a man go to see the elephant only
to call him a pachydermatous quadruped?

But we are wasting time and shall never get into the woods. In the
winter wild you will hardly get far into them, except at the Christmas
season for greenery. Gathering this by deputy is poor business. It is
all very well, if you can do no better, to engage Mr. Brown to engage
some one else to bring in the needed spruce, fir, and hemlock with which
to obscure the fresco deformities of St. Boniface's; but it is far
better to hunt for them yourself. There is something intensely
delightful in the changes of the search; for it begins dull enough. You
start in the drear December weather, with a gray sky and leaden clouds
softly shaded in regular billows, like an India-ink ocean, overhead,
and a somewhat muddy lane before you. Then to pick one's way across the
plashy meadows, and, after a ticklish pass of jumping from one reedy
tussock to another, to get once more upon the firm soil, while the
grass, dry and crisp under your feet, gives a pleasant _whish, 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