Through all the ages those who see, whether poet or planter, think the same great thoughts. Tennyson said of the flower plucked from the crannied wall, that if he could know what it was he should know what God and man were. They bring a larger thought even than that, for they prove that God is Beauty.
Even as I was thinking this the train rushed through what had once been a wood, but was now a burnt and scarred spot, bare of life. The azaleas in their beauty, were the flame in the woods which Nature had kindled: but this desolate spot was the flame which had come from the hand of man...
When the train stopped for water at the little station I got out and gathered a great bunch of flowers for Eloise....
Then as we dropped down into the Middle Basin, filled with the blue grass in its spring glory, whole acres of hepaticas twinkled up at us like fallen fireflies.
At last I was home again, and home with a new mission, new ideas. For four years I had studied trees and flowers in a German university. I had prepared myself to be a forester. Now I was looking out of the car window at the wantonness that had turned hillsides into gullies and rich loam into beds of clay. The little streams that I had remembered running from a familiar wood, now crawled, winding amid sand dunes bare of trees. The folly of it hurt me. I saw that here was work for me to do.
CHAPTER II
THE HOME-STRETCH
How familiar were the hills around the little Hermitage Station! And how grateful was the sweet clear air of its dew-bathed meadows after the noise and smoke of the train!
My Aunt Lucretia imprinted two chilly kisses from tight-shut lips on each of my cheeks. She was a large, strong, stout woman, with a fine, high nose and full mouth, which, when it would, could settle quickly into close-shut lips of determination. Her eyes were hazel and keen: kindly when quiet; but quick to flash and far-seeing.
Without a word and very deliberately she looked me over through her gold nose glasses. I smiled as I remembered how often I had seen her pass on a horse she was purchasing in the same way. Down the six feet of my height her keen eyes went, dwelling, I imagine, a bit longer on my legs where the old lameness had been in my knee since my boyhood sickness from typhoid fever. Again I smiled, for in that same way I had seen her linger over the doubtful tendon of a horse. But the noted German surgeon, Hoffman, had, in my first year at Berlin, skillfully removed the floating cartilage, and I saw my Aunt Lucretia's face light up, satisfied with the straight limb, and my weight upon it. Then she looked lengthwise across my shoulders, and a surprised pleasure shone in her eyes. I had grown from a frail boy into an athlete.