"I wouldn't like to live in a little bit of a house sticking out on
the 'pike like that," said aunt Corinne to her nephew. "Folks could
run against it on dark nights. Does he stay there by himself? And if
robbers or old beggars came by they could nab him the minute he
opened his door."

"But if he has any boys," suggested Robert looking back, "they can
see everybody pass, and it'd be just as good as going some place all
the time. And who's afraid of robbers!"

Zene beckoned to the carriage as he turned off the 'pike. For a
distance the wagon moved ahead of them, between tall stake fences
which were overrun with vines or had their corners crowded with bushes.
Wheat and cornfields and sweet-smelling buckwheat spread out on each
side until the woods met them, and not a bit of the afternoon heat
touched the carriage after that. Aunt Corinne clasped a leather-covered
upright which hurt her hand before, and leaned toward the trees on
her side. Every new piece of woodland is an unexplored country containing
moss-lined stumps, dimples of hollows full of mint, queer-shaped trees,
and hickory saplings just the right saddle-curve for bending down as
"teeters," such as are never reproduced in any other piece of woodland.
Nature does not make two trees alike, and her cool breathing-halls under
the woods' canopies are as diverse as the faces of children wandering
there. Moss or lichens grow thicker in one spot; another particular
enclosure you call the lily or the bloodroot woods, and yet another
the wild-grape woods. This is distinguished for blackberries away up
in the clearings, and that is a fishing woods, where the limbs stretch
down to clear holes, and you sit in a root seat and hear springs
trickling down the banks while you fish. Though Corinne could possess
these reaches of trees only with a brief survey, she enjoyed them as a