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
novelty.
"I would like to get lost in the woods," she observed, "and have
everybody out hunting me while I had to eat berries and roots. I
don't believe I'd like roots, though: they look so big and tough.
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