The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 5.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

Our nearest route home lay across the pastures and over Blueberry Hill, just at the foot of which we encountered Elder Staples and Skipper Evans, who had been driving their cows to pasture, and were now leisurely strolling back to the village. We toiled together up the hill in the hot sunshine, and, just on its eastern declivity, were glad to find a white-oak tree, leaning heavily over a little ravine, from the bottom of which a clear spring of water bubbled up and fed a small rivulet, whose track of darker green might be traced far down the hill to the meadow at its foot.

A broad shelf of rock by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his keen gray eyes, flashing under their dark penthouse, happily relieved by the softer lines of his mouth, indicative of his really genial and generous nature. A small, sinewy figure, half doubled up, with his chin resting on his rough palms, Skipper Evans sat on a lower projection of the rock just beneath him, in an attentive attitude, as at the feet of Gamaliel. Dark and dry as one of his own dunfish on a Labrador flake, or a seal-skin in an Esquimaux hut,