Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

ill with rheumatic fever and this was their first trip after being in bed for months—; After supper for short walk in hillside & down road. Once we heard a whip-pour-will which neither of us had heard for years. A pleasant evening.; Our cabin was lit by gas and just as we were preparing for bed, it [broke] & we were in almost complete darkness. So we went up to the office and brought a flash-light, and some other supplies. We tried without success to call home. ; In the morning as we were lying in bed I noticed what I thought was a knot-hole in one of the rafters just above the window. It seemed a particular formation with streaks radiating from the dark center—I remarked to B—“You know I could almost imagine that knot hole had legs” but did not really think so—we dismissed it a few minutes and then to make sure, I turned the flash light on it—It revealed the “knot hole” to be an enormous spider, guarding a sac [sic] of eggs. That ended our dallying—we dressed and washed as soon as possible, and left. However, to save some one with more marked spider-phobia than ours, a nasty shock, I told the landlady of the spiders there—; It is impossible for me to write here anything adequate about the beauty of Cook’s Forest. It was beyond anything I had ever imagined—I can think of nothing better than Longfellow’s impressive lines in the prologue to his Evangeline “This is the First Primeval”. The glory of these ancient gigantic hemlocks is beyond me to describe — We had the woods practically to ourselves. The silence—the flavor of the woods stronger with the years accumulation of rotting hemlock needles. Great rotting legs green with rank—growing moss the great boulders