WINTER BIRDS’-NESTING
LAST night the world was all soft with mist. Over on the brow of Cemetery Hill you looked off into an illimitable distance of it. Horizon after horizon loomed over the shoulder of its fellows as the gray-draped hills rose one beyond the other and tiptoed softly away into the yonder world,—so softly that you could not tell where the earth ended and the heavens began.
The landscape passed like an elder saint from this world to the next, you could scarce tell when, only that you were awed and soothed with the soft serenity of the going. In the hush that followed the soft blue mists changed their draperies for black, in mourning for the passing of the twilight saint, and thus night came.
Last summer night on this hilltop was filled with voices. A million insects chirped and sang. Tree toads trilled, amorous toads played bagpipes all along the margin of the swamp below, and in deeper water a thousand frogs shouted one to another in guttural diapason. A little screech owl used to sit in the darker corner of the pines and ululate all to himself far into the night, and here and there a songbird, stirring in his sleep, would pipe a mellow note. A coon would whinny or a fox would yap, and there were many other sounds whose source you might not surely define. The forefathers who wait serenely beneath their slate headstones all along the brow of the hill had much and pleasant company when the year was in its prime. Now their nights are as silent as if the world itself were dead, their company ghosts of mist as tenuous as their own.
The morning after such a night does not break from above; it grows. It rises out of the earth like a soft tide, as if the mists that went to sleep in it last night were the first of all creatures up, making all things gray again. These tiptoe up, tangling their soft garments in the trees and roof tops till they slip from them and pass on into the upper spaces, where their unclothed spirits become the morning light. The garments, clinging still to all things, remain behind as hoar frost.
That is the way it was this morning. All the trees had white baby leaves of infinite daintiness and ghosts of blossoms that were not real enough for a promise. I might better call them remembrance, touched with hope. Hardly was the touch of hope there at the earliest light. It was just white and delicate remembrance. Then, with the thought of the sun, only the thought for the sun himself was not to come for long, there came a slender opalescence welling through these white garments, an iridescent presence that you felt rather than saw, till I knew without looking to the east that the dawn had grown out of the earth into the high heavens and the miracle was complete.