The Reaping by Mary Imlay Taylor

ROSE let the bridle lie loosely on her horse's neck as they halted at the elbow of the path. Rock Creek, leaping over its gray boulders and flowing between them with little swirls of foam, comes rushing madly past, slips under the trailing branches of a weeping birch and suddenly widening, hushes its tumult and drops placidly below the ford, where, in summer, in a wide shallow basin, the swan and the little white ducks lie. The scene was wild; the untouched forest rose behind them, its bare gray limbs against the sky, the black green of an occasional spruce or cedar breaking the monotony above the brown-leafed earth and closing the long vistas of stripped tree trunks which stand on the shoulder of the hill in serried ranks in the teeth of the north wind, like soldiers, with their faces to the foe. Below, the stream gurgled and murmured; on the farther bank the dense growth of young maples showed here and there a scarlet bud. The air was sweet, redolent with fresh pine and the promise of the spring; overhead the crows were flying by twos and tens and twenties, lost at last in the soft blue distance.

Fox, who was riding with Rose, dismounted and turning back the dead leaves on a sunny slope found a single spray of arbutus. She uttered a little exclamation of pleasure, holding out her hand.