Chapter 2 - Page 2

much power; but when his little nag stopped of itself on a small eminence,
which the crooked cow-path he was following crossed, his mind yielded to
the impression of more worldly and more sensible objects. As the scene,
that drew his contemplations from so many abstract theories to the
realities of life, was peculiar to the country, and is more or less
connected with the subject of our tale, we shall endeavor briefly to
describe it.

A small tributary of the Connecticut divided the view into two nearly
equal parts. The fertile flats that extended on each of its banks for more
than a mile, had been early stripped of their burthen of forest, and they
now lay in placid meadows, or in fields from which the grain of the season
had lately disappeared, and over which the plow had already left the marks
of recent tillage. The whole of the plain, which ascended gently from the
rivulet towards the forest, was subdivided in inclosures, by numberless

fences, constructed in the rude but substantial manner of the country.
Rails, in which lightness and economy of wood had been but little
consulted, lying in zigzag lines, like the approaches which the besieger
makes in his cautious advance to the hostile fortress, were piled on each
other, until barriers seven or eight feet in height, were interposed to
the inroads of vicious cattle. In one spot, a large square vacancy had
been cut into the forest, and, though numberless stumps of trees darkened
its surface, as indeed they did many of the fields on the flats
themselves, bright, green grain was sprouting forth, luxuriantly, from the
rich and virgin soil. High against the side of an adjacent hill, that
might aspire to be called a low rocky mountain, a similar invasion had
been made on the dominion of the trees; but caprice or convenience had
induced an abandonment of the clearing, after it had ill requited the toil
of felling the timber by a single crop. In this spot, straggling, girdled,
and consequently dead trees, piles of logs, and black and charred stubs,
were seen deforming the beauty of a field, that would, otherwise, have
been striking from its deep setting in the woods. Much of the surface of
this opening, too, was now concealed by bushes of what is termed the
second growth; though, here and there, places appeared, in which the
luxuriant white clover, natural to the country, had followed the close
grazing of the flocks. The eyes of Mark were bent, inquiringly, on this
clearing, which, by an air line, might have been half a mile from the
place where his horse had stopped, for the sounds of a dozen differently
toned cow-bells were brought, on the still air of the evening, to his
ears; from among its bushes.

The evidences of civilization were the least equivocal,