sod; it looks like nothing worthy of note; but, if you have faith
enough to pick it up, behold a relic! Thoreau, who has a strange
faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set
me on the search; and I afterwards enriched myself with some very
perfect specimens, so rudely wrought that it seemed almost as if
chance had fashioned them. Their great charm consists in this
rudeness and in the individuality of each article, so different from
the productions of civilized machinery, which shapes everything on one
pattern. There is exquisite delight, too, in picking up for one's
self an arrow-head that was dropped centuries ago and has never been
handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the hand of the
red hunter, who purposed to shoot it at his game or at an enemy. Such
an incident builds up again the Indian village and its encircling
forest, and recalls to life the painted chiefs and warriors, the
squaws at their household toil, and the children sporting among the
wigwams, while the little wind-rocked pappoose swings from the branch
of a tree. It can hardly be told whether it is a joy or a pain, after
such a momentary vision, to gaze around in the broad daylight of
reality and see stone fences, white houses, potato-fields, and men
doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and homespun pantaloons. But
this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better than a thousand wigwams.

The Old Manse! We had almost forgotten it, but will return thither
through the orchard. This was set out by the last clergyman, in the
decline of his life, when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed
man for planting trees from which he could have no prospect of
gathering fruit. Even had that been the case, there was only so much
the better motive for planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of
benefiting his successors,--an end so seldom achieved by more
ambitious efforts. But the old minister, before reaching his