I remembered how, as a boy, I used to long for a watch-chain, and how once Uncle Eb hung his upon my coat, and said I could “call it mine.” So it goes all through life. We are the veriest children, and there is nothing one may really own. He may call it his for a little while, just to satisfy him. The whole matter of deeds and titles had become now a kind of baby's play. You may think you own the land, and you pass on; but there it is, while others, full of the same old illusion, take your place.
I followed the brook to where it idled on, bordered with buttercups, in a great meadow. The music and the color halted me, and I lay on my back in the tall grass for a little while, and looked up at the sky and listened. There under the clover tops I could
hear the low, sweet music of many wings—the continuous treble of the honey-bee in chord with flashes of deep bass from the wings of that big, wild, improvident cousin of his.
Above this lower heaven I could hear a tournament of bobolinks. They flew over me, and clung in the grass tops and sang—their notes bursting out like those of a plucked string. What a pressure of delight was behind them! Hope and I used to go there for berries when we were children, and later—when youth had come, and the colors of the wild rose and the tiger-lily were in our faces—we found a secret joy in being alone together. Those days there was something beautiful in that hidden fear we had of each other—was it not the native, imperial majesty of innocence? The look of
