I broke through Heywood’s thick wood, north of Moore’s land, going toward Beck Stow’s in the Great Fields, and unexpectedly came into a long, narrow, winding, and very retired blueberry swamp which I did not know existed there. A spot seemingly untrodden, - a deep withdrawn meadow, sunk low amid the forest and filled with green waving sedge, three feet high, and low andromeda and hardhack, for the most part dry to the feet and with no print of man or beast, interspersed with islands of blueberry bushes and surrounded by a dense hedge of high blueberry bushes, panicled andromeda, high choke-berry, wild holly, with its beautiful crimson berries, etc., etc., this being the front rank to a higher wood. Thus hedged about these places are, so that it is only at some late year that you stumble upon them. Crouching you thread your way amid some dense shrub oak wood some day, descending next through the almost impenetrable hedge, and stand to your surprise on the edge of this fair open meadow with a bottom of unfathomed mud, as retired and novel as if it were a thousand miles removed from your ordinary walks. Not penetrable except in mid-summer. It is as far off as Persia from Concord. I entered from this swamp to that next south, through a narrow passage hardly a foot wide, stooping close to the ground, worn by some cows once, brushing off blueberries in my passage, and then burst out into another yet larger swamp, or meadow, of a similar character. And in the first I found great blueberries as big as old-fashioned bullets or cranberries, - the ambrosial fruit. These grew side by side in singular harmony in the dense hedge with crimson holly berries and black choke-berries. Over these meadows the marsh hawk circles undisturbed. What means this profusion of berries at this season only? Beck Stow’s is much frequented by cows, which burst through the thickest bushes.
