The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning

It was really a charming scene. Some huge hickories overshadowed it to the north and a great sequoia towered on the west, secluding the natural clearing to the warm southeast winds. Over its floors ran vines whose bright green leaves and clumps of partridge berries showed red in the midsummer sun. All around-the wilderness! At the foot of a bank of mountain laurel was a slight depression in the carpet of brown leaves, as if water settled there in heavy rains. No human habitation nor any vestige of the human touch was observable through the undergrowth in any direction. This was strange, for the spot was once on the map as a fashionable suburb of New York City.

To a twentieth-century observer another thing would have been noticeable-the woods were of natural growth, but the sequoia is a native of the California coast. To the squirrels who frequented the trees, the sequoia was no stranger; it had stood there through thousands of squirrel generations and was now as natural as the hickories. One red squirrel, nosing for last year's nuts near the tangle of laurel, stopped all motion suddenly and eyed the depression in the ground rather sharply.