And often it is I am going to come comes back again here to cathedral service and talks with them I know, and to leave letters for the fairies in the moss-box. I have thinks about the mill town. Maybe in the fields over on the other side of the mill town—maybe there there will be étourneau and ortolan and draine and durbec and loriot and verdier and rossignol and pinson and pivoine. When I am come to the mill town, I will go explores to see, and I will build altars for Saint Louis. Now I go to see Dear Love.
When I was come near unto her little house, I had seeing of Dear Love. She was sitting on the steps by her door drying her hair in the sun. It did wave little ripples of light when the wind did go in a gentle way by. She let me have feels of its touches. And she did give me a kiss on each cheek and one on the nose when she lifted me onto her lap. And then Dear Love did tell me a secret. It’s hers and her husband’s secret that the angels did let them know ahead—they are going to have a baby soon.
I felt a big amount of satisfaction. It is about time that prayer was answered. Some prayers you pray a little while and answers come. Some prayers you pray more times and answers don’t come. I have not knows of why. But prayers for babies get answered soon—most always they do. The time is so long I have been praying prayers for Dear Love to have a baby soon. And now the angels have told her it’s going to come in about five months. I have thinks that is quite a time long to wait waits.
And Dear Love has showed me the clothes the angels did tell her to make ahead for its coming. And there is two little shirts and bands, and very long underskirts with feather stitches in them, and there’s a little cream kimona with a blue ribbon bow on it. I looked looks at it a long time. And Dear Love said she was going to make one just like it for Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus. I am glad. And there was more little clothes, and while we was looking at them the husband of Dear Love did come in the door and he did look adores at Dear Love. It’s just our secret—just Dear Love’s and her husband’s and mine. Nobody knows it but just us three, and Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus and Brave Horatius and Edward I and lovely Queen Eleanor of Castile and Michael Angelo Sanzio Raphael and Aphrodite and Lucian Horace Ovid Virgil and Felix Mendelssohn and Plato and Pliny and Minerva and her chickens and Menander Euripides Theocritus Thucydides and Louis II, le Grand Condé, and the willows that grow by Nonette.
Now Brave Horatius and me and Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus are going to prayers in the cathedral. The great pine tree is saying a poem, and there is a song in the tree-tops.
[POSTSCRIPT]
After this I lived in a great many other lumber camps, and there were new people and new animal friends and new nurseries and other cathedrals. I studied in the woods and wrote down what I saw and heard. In the spring of 1918 I went from Oregon to Southern California, to do more research work in natural science, earning my way by teaching nature classes. In the winter of 1918 I published my first nature-book, paying for it by taking orders for it in advance.
In the summer of 1919 I came East, hoping to be able to get another nature-book published. In my going to see publishers, I came to the editor of the Atlantic. While I was telling the editor about this book, he asked me if I never kept a diary, and this is the answer.
After the seventh year and far on into other years I continued the diary; but perhaps some other time the story of all these things will be pieced together and made into another book.