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The forbidden farm had, of course, its thousand novelties. I saw prickly pears in blossom upon a ledge of rock; a great lunar-moth resting drowsily, almost drunkenly, in the parasol shade of a wild-carrot blossom; here was the half of a wagon wheel, the wood rotted away, and there in the tangle an ancient cistern mouth of brick, the cistern filled to the brim with alluring rubbish. My sister sprang with a gurgle of delight to catch a garter snake, which eluded her; and a last year’s brier, tough and humorously inclined, seized upon Mary by the skirts and legs, so that it was a matter of five minutes and piercing screams of merriment to cast her loose again. But soon we drew out of the hot sunshine into the old orchard with its paltry display of deformed, green, runt apples, and its magnificent columns and canopies of poison ivy–that most beautiful and least amiable of our indigenous plants; and then we got among scale-bark hickories, and there was one that had been fluted from top to bottom by a stroke of lightning; and here the little red squirrels were most unusually abundant and indignant; and there was a catbird that miauled exactly like a cat; and there was a spring among the roots of one great tree, and a broken teacup half buried in the sand at the bottom.

We left the hickories and entered among the oaks, and here was the greatest to-do imaginable to find the one that was hollow. Ellen went to the left, I to the right, and Mary down the middle. Whenever I came to an unusually big tree I tiptoed around the trunk, goggle-eyed, expecting the vasty hollow to open before me. And I am sure that Ellen, whom I had presently lost sight of, behaved in the same way. Mary also had disappeared, and feeling lonely all of a sudden I called to her. She answered a moment later in a strange voice. I thought that she must have fallen and hurt herself; but when I found her she was cheerful and smiling. She was standing with her back to a snug hollow in the vast stem of the very oak we had been looking for.

“This is it,” she said, and turned and pointed to the hollow. “Where’s Ellen?”

“Here, Ellen,” I called, “here–we’ve found it!”

Then Ellen came scampering through the wood; and first I climbed into the hollow and curled up to see what sort of a night I might have of it, and then I climbed out and Ellen climbed in–and then both in at once, and we kept house for a while and gave a couple of dinners and tea parties. And then quarreled about the probable size of Friar Tuck, and Ellen drew the line at further imaginings and left me alone in the hollow.

This extended all the way up the main trunk and all but out through the top. Here and there it pierced through the outer bark, so that slants of pale light served to carry the eye up and up until it became lost in inky blackness. Now and then dust and little showers of dry rot descended softly upon the upturned face; and if you put your ear close to the wood you could hear, as through the receiver of a telephone, things that were going on among the upper branches; as when the breeze puffed up and they sighed and creaked together. I could hear a squirrel scampering and a woodpecker at work–or so I guessed, though it sounded more like a watch ticking. I made several essays to climb up the hollow, but the knotholes and crevices, and odds and ends of support, were too far removed from each other for the length of my limbs, and, furthermore, my efforts seemed to shake the whole tree and bring down whole smarting showers of dust and dry rot and even good-sized fragments. I got up a few feet, lost my hold, and fell into the soft, punky nest at the bottom.