IT was a June day with the sparkle and lilt of summer's brightest and tunefulest mood in the sky and a softness and warmth in the air. The most distant peaks of the mountains slept in a quiet and purple glory and their nearer slopes still held a forest-freshness undulled by heat and sunburn.
Deep in the woods of the White Mountains the wild flowers were springing joyously and the birds were pouring out the fulness of life and joy and love from trilling throats.
The waters of Lake Forsaken were like a mirror holding in their still bosom all the vivid color which summer paints into its first and sweetest days while an after-note of spring's youth still lingers. The blue of the sky was broken only by white cloud-sails that rode high and buoyant in the upper air currents, like galleons of dreams, and all these things were given back in reflection from depths where the bass leaped and the sun shimmered. On the lake's farther margin a red-brown shape came down with careful feet gingerly lifted and set down, to raise its antlered head. But the gentle eyes were not charged with fear, for this was a season of security and truce with mankind.
If the world held trouble anywhere, no shadow of its passing riffled or marred the landscape here. And yet in this smile and song of nature, there must be a certain disregard for human affairs, because the movement which held the deer's gaze, as he stood there at the water's edge, looking across the width of Lake Forsaken, was the movement of human beings trailing along the road in a funeral cortège.
The road along which it traveled was no longer a deeply scarred trail, rutted through its clay surface by the hauling of lumber. It was metaled and smooth. There were many changes in the character of things hereabouts—all changes which attested that the curse of decay and hopeless sterility had been lifted. Off through a rift in the hills loomed the white concrete abutment of an aqueduct—and through the valley wound a railroad. A man might have walked many miles and come upon few deserted habitations, preyed upon by the twin vandals Time and Decay and staring blankly out through unglazed windows. What had once been a land of abandoned farms, a battle-ground where poverty had fought and defeated humanity, was now a land redeemed. Honest thrift and substantial comfort had crowned it with reclamation.
The church to which the hearse was making its way had also changed in aspect. The tumbledown building had become a more worthy house of worship, unelaborate, but renewed. Its belfry stood upright and on the Sabbath spoke out in the music of its chimes. Graves where once the headstones had teetered in neglect lay now in rows of ordered care, and those who slept in them no longer slept among the briars of over-grown thickets.
About the building, waiting for the coming of a new tenant in the acre of the dead, were gathered a score or more of neighbors, because the body which was to be laid to rest today had been, in life, the member of a family which they delighted to honor and respect.
Along the stone wall which skirted the road, and under the wild apple trees, were hitched the wagons and buggies that had brought them from many miles around, across the hills. Some of them came from houses far back where roads narrowed and grew precipitous.
Yet even among those who stood waiting in the churchyard near the reminder of an open grave, the lyric tunefulness of this June morning refused to surrender unconditionally to sadness. Off between the fence and the rising slope of the nearest hill a ripple ran across a yellow field of buckwheat and from a fence-post a golden-breasted lark sang merrily.
Those who had arrived earliest gossiped of such commonplace matters as make the round of life where small things take the place of large excitement, and their faces were not gloomy faces. Young men and girls among them were strolling apart, and the smiles in their eyes told that to them death was an incident, but June and love a nearer fact—a thing closer to their youth.