[XII]
DRAGON’S BLOOD
Then Sigurd went his way and roasted the heart of Fafnir on a rod. And when he tasted the blood, straightway he wot the speech of every bird of the air.
It takes longer nowadays. Yet the years are well spent. There is a strange indescribable happiness that comes with the knowledge of the bird-notes. As for the songs—they are not only among the joys of life, but they bring with them many other happinesses. Even as I write, the memory of many of them comes back to me: wind-swept hilltops; white sand-dunes against a blue, blue sea; singing rows of pine trees marching miles and miles through the barrens; jade-green pools; crooked streams of smoky-brown water; lonely islands; orchid-haunted marsh-lands; far journeyings and good fellowship with others who have learned the Way—these are but a few of them. Let me entreat you to leave the narrow in-door days and wander far afield before it be too late.
Come sit beside the weary way
And hear the angels sing.
Ride with Aucassin into the greenwood. There perchance, as happed to him, you will see the green grass grow and listen to the sweet birds sing and hear some good word.
To him who will but listen there are adventures in bird-songs anywhere, any time, and any season. It was but last winter that I found myself again in the dawn-dusk facing a defiant hickory, armed only with an axe. Let me recommend to every man who is worried about his body, his soul, or his estate during the winter months, that he buy or borrow a well-balanced axe and cut down and cut up a few trees for fire-wood. As he forces the tingling iced oxygen into every cell of his lungs, he will find that he is taking a new view of life and love and debt and death, and other perplexing and perennial topics.
Quite recently I read a journal that a young minister kept, back in the fifties. One entry especially appealed to me.
“Decided this morning that I was not the right man for this church. Chopped wood for two hours in Colonel Hewitt’s wood-lot. Decided that this was the church for me and that I was the man for this church.”