"My greeting to all the brothers. There are wars and rumours of wars in the air of the Northwest...."
I restored the letter to my pocket, and lay back in the grass, beneath the branches.
Wars and rumours of wars—well, they were far enough from here, as every twittering birdling manifested.
The colonel had always been the man of action among us, though he, of us all, had the wherewithal to be the most at ease.
One of those strange incongruities with which life abounds, and which, I reflected, must be accepted with resignation.
I had always rather prided myself upon the completeness with which I had resigned myself to my lot of idleness and obscurity, and to my own mind was a philosopher of no small merit.
I lay back under the trees full of the content of the day and the green woods and abandoned myself to meditation.
Whether it was the spirit of Spring or some latent essence of activity in my being, I do not know, but certain it is that a wave of discontent spread over me—a weariness (very unfamiliar) of myself and my cheap philosophy.
I sat up, wondering at the change and its suddenness, groping in my mind for a solution to the problem.
Could it be that my rule of life was based on a fallacy?