"Don't have secrets. When there are secrets, I always want to peek——"
Yesterday, a little later, we both looked up from work at the notes of a song-sparrow in the nearest elm. The song was more elaborate for the perfect morning. It was so joyous that it choked me—in the sunlight and elm-leaves. It stood out from all the songs of the morning because it was so near—every note so finished and perfect, and we were each in the pleasantness of our tasks. The little girl leaned over to the window. I was already watching. We heard the answer from the distance. The song was repeated, and again. In the hushes, we sipped the ecstasy from the Old Mother—that the sparrow knew and expressed. Like a flicker, he was gone—a leaning forward on the branch and then a blur,... presently this sentence in the room:
" ... sang four songs and flew away."
It was a word-portrait. It told me so much that I wanted; the number of course was not mental, but an obvious part of the inner impression. However, no after explanations will help—if the art of the thing is not apparent. I told it later in the day to another class, and a woman said—"Why, those six words make a Japanese poem."
And yesterday again, as we walked over to dinner, she said: "I see a Chinese city. It is dim and low and smoky. It is night and the lights are at half-mast."
She had been making a picture of her own of China. It throws the child in on herself to imagine thus. She has never been to China, and her reading on the subject was not recent. I always say to them: "It is all within. If you can listen deeply enough and see far enough, you can get it all. When a man wishes to write about a country, he is hindered as much as helped if he knows much about it. He feels called upon to express that which he has seen—which is so small compared to the big colour and atmosphere."
I had been to China but would have required a page to make such a picture.
A little while before she had been to Holland in fancy. She had told a story of a child there and "the little house in which she lived looked as if it had been made of old paving-blocks ripped up from the street."
Often she falls back upon the actual physical environment to get started, as this recent introduction: "To-day I am sitting on the end of a breakwater, listening to the peaceful noise the Lake makes as it slaps up against the heavy old rocks. The sun is pouring down hot rays upon my arms, bare feet and legs, turning them from winter's faded white——"
Or: