When I first began to venture the human touch in it, it
afforded no open spot level enough to hold a camp-stool. From the lawn
above to the river road below, the distance is three hundred and thirty
feet, and the fall, of fifty-five feet, is mostly at the upper end,
which is therefore too steep, as well as too full of varied undergrowth,
for any going but climbing. In the next ravine on its left there was a
clear, cold spring and in the one on its right ran a natural rivulet
that trickled even in August; but this middle ravine was dry or merely
moist.
Here let me say to any who would try an amateur landscape art on their
own acre at the edge of a growing town, that the town's growth tends
steadily to diminish the amount of their landscape's natural water
supply by catching on street pavements and scores and hundreds of roofs,
lawns and walks, and carrying away in sewers, the rain and melting snows
which for ages filtered slowly through the soil. Small wonder, I think,
that, when in the square quarter-mile between my acre and Elm Street
fifty-three dwellings and three short streets took the place of an old
farm, my grove, by sheer water famine, lost several of its giant pines.
Wonder to me is that the harm seems at length to have ceased.
But about that ravine: one day the nature of its growth and soil,
especially its alders, elders, and willows and a show of clay and
gravel, forced on my notice the likelihood that here, too, had once been
a spring, if no more.
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