Considering how much more wood the worm fences require (since they run in bendings) than other inclosures which go in straight lines, and that they are so soon useless, one may imagine how the forests will be consumed, and what sort of an appearance the country will have forty or fifty years hence, in case no alteration is made; especially as wood is really squandered away in immense quantities, day and night all the winter, or nearly one-half of the year, for fewel.
These rude forefathers of ours evidently had small concern for future posterity. Wood they had in abundance and they burned it without stint. The smell of the hearth smoke must have gone deep into their veins and its subtle influence still evokes a sense of homeliness in those of us who perchance have inherited some ancestral response that makes for happiness quite as much as acres of standing timber.
In New England the mantle of drift, that had been strewn over the land by the melting of an ancient glacier, afforded abundant material for the building of "stone fences." These old walls, beset with weeds and briars, became the retreat of many of the smaller wild animals that had been driven from their forest stronghold by the clearing of the land. The fox still finds a friendly road in the cover of these boundaries, and the woodchuck, ensconced within some sheltering cranny, whistles his shrill note of defiance against the harassing boy and dog.
The surroundings of a homestead very often reflect certain local conditions. The picturesque "well-sweep" still survives here and there in rural New England and its origin may possibly be traced to the long pine pole of the region. The well-sweep also appears in the pine wood tracts of the coastal plain in Delaware, and probably elsewhere. In the middle Atlantic region the "spring-house" was an early adjunct of the dairy. Many old spring-houses still linger throughout this land, with crumbling roofs and weathered walls falling slowly into decay while the rill trickles through, reminiscent of a time when pans of creamy milk and bowls of yellow butter stood cooling in its water. Ofttimes, in near-by spots, these rills and springs are choked with a growth of the pungent water-cress. Modern separator machinery has dispossessed the spring-house—only on some remote farm does it still do service. Its passing is not altogether to be regretted, for many women-folk fell early victims to the crippling rheumatism that its damp walls engendered. Occasionally some poor family makes a home in one of these abandoned structures, and this recalls a still more interesting abode which one now and then happens upon in some out-of-the-way district—an old log-house that has lingered on through the changing years, a quaint reminder of the past. I know of several such houses not many miles from Philadelphia. The spring-house appears to be altogether local in its origin; the abundant springs and rills along the hillside borders of wide meadow pastures inviting the
