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The Heart of Monadnock
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berries everywhere, little ascents and drops of the path, moss and maples, spruces and blueberries all around. But to say, nevertheless, that they were all alike was to say that the human race is all alike because all men have two eyes, a nose and a mouth. There are people who say that all Chinese look alike to them; or all negroes. Also, all mountain paths.

As usual the deciduous trees swiftly gave way to the hardy spruces which defy the upland winds even though tortured and twisted and stunted by them. Trees only five feet high, up here often have a diameter of seven or eight inches; their lowest boughs may carpet the ground for a distance of ten feet in the direction away from the prevailing knife-blade winds of the winter, making an elastic bed on which one may lie. Always the trees are one sided, throwing out their defiant, blunted green pennons away from the wind. Courageous little warriors! Battered out of shape, thwarted in every design of symmetry, balked in their ambitions,