The last holiday of the century found me in the place where I was born, with weather made on purpose for out-of-door pleasures—warm, bright, and still. A sudden inspiration took me. I would go to see the old berry pastures—not all of them (the forenoon would hardly be long enough for that), but two or three of the nearest, on opposite sides of the same back road. It would be a kind of second boyhood.
As I traveled the road itself, past two or three houses that were not there in the old time, two at least of the older wayside trees greeted me with the season's compliments. Or possibly it was I that greeted them. In this kind of intercourse, it is hard to tell speaker from hearer. We greeted each other, let us say, though they are the older, and by good rights should have spoken first. They have held their own exceedingly well,
