And I like the sound of a lawn-mower. It is such a busy click and whirr. It seems to work so willingly. Not even a sewing-machine has quite so brisk a tempo. And when a lawn-mower strikes a twig, it stops suddenly on its haunches with such impatience to be off again. "Bend over, won't you," it seems to say, "and pull out that stick. These trees are a pesky nuisance. They keep dropping branches all the while. Now then! Are we ready? Whee! What's an apple? I can cut an apple all to flinders. You whistle and I'll whirr. Let's run down that slope together!"
On Dropping Off to Sleep.
I SLEEP too well—that is, I go to sleep too soon. I am told that I pass a few minutes of troubled breathing—not vulgar snores, but a kind of uneasy ripple on the shore of wakefulness—then I drift out with the silent tide. Doubtless I merit no sympathy for my perfection—and yet—
Well, in the first place, lately we have had windy, moonlit nights and as my bed sets at the edge of the sleeping porch and the rail cuts off the earth, it is like a ride in an aëroplane to lie awake among the torn and ragged clouds. I have cast off the moorings of the sluggish world. Our garden with its flowering path, the coop for our neighbor's chickens, the apple tree, all have sunk from sight. The prow of my plane is pitched across the top of a waving poplar. Earth's harbor lights are at the stern. The Pleiades mark the channel to the open sky. I must hang out a lantern to fend me from the moon.
I shall keep awake for fifteen minutes, I think. Perhaps I can recall Keats's sonnet to the night:
| "When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, |
| Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance—" |
and those lines of Milton about the moon rising in clouded majesty, unveiling her peerless light.
Here a star peeps out. Presently its companions will show themselves and I shall know the constellation. Are they playing like little children at hide-and-seek? Do I catch Arcturus looking from its cover? Shall I shout hi-spy to Alpha Lyra? A shooting star, that has crouched behind a cloud, runs home to the goal untagged. Surely these glistening worlds cannot be hard-fisted planets like our own, holding a close schedule across the sky. They have looted the shining treasure of the sunset. They sail the high fantastic seas like caravels blown from India. In the twilight they have lifted vagrant anchors and they will moor in strange havens at the dawn.
Are not these ragged clouds the garment of the night? Like the beggar maiden of an ancient tale she runs with flying raiment. She unmasks her beauty when the world's asleep. And the wind, like an eager prince upon his wooing, rides out of the stormy north.
And then! Poof! Sleep draws its dark curtain across the glittering pageant—