time a hay knife (probably) has rendered him tailless.

* * * * *

_August_ 20. Summer is at high tide. How I dread its ebbing; yet even now
the hastening nights are giving warning. Evan has been taking a
vacation, and we have spent many days, we four, following the northward
windings of the river in a wide, comfortable boat and lunching in the
woods. We are pagans these days, basking in the sun, cooling in the
shade, and living a whole life between sunrise and sunset. The boys are
showing unconscious kinship with wood things, and getting a wholesome
touch of the earth in their thoughts.

I am sure that the mind often needs a vacation more than the body, and
yet the condition of change that bears the name of rest frequently merely
gives the head fresh work.

How far away the Whirlpool and its people seem as we sit perhaps on one
of the many tiny river islands enjoying this time separateness, not as
individuals, but as a family, for the whirl of the pool is tiresome even
to watch. I have felt old these last three months, and I suppose it is a
still further carrying out of the allegory and penalty of eating the
fruit of the tree of knowledge; only the discipline does seem a little
hard when, having no desire either to pluck or taste the apple, one
stands actually away with hands safely behind back, and yet has the fruit
absolutely thrust between unwilling lips.

Even the feathered things about us are in this mood; their family life
is over, the companionship of fall travel has not begun, and the woods
are full of moulting birds choosing this separateness in preparation for
the tension of new flight and its perils. Everything, in short, in wild
nature has its corresponding note in our own humanity,--the sweating of
the corn, the moulting of the bird, the contraction of the earth by
frost, all have a kindred season or experience in the heart.

Then, too, the August nights--so heavy with the intensity of sleep that
is akin to sleeplessness, broken by peremptory thunder voices and
searching lightning, or again enveloped by moonlight that floods the
room--shut out the world until, kneeling in its tide between the little
white beds, I can feel the refrain of that hymn of mother's that father
taught me long ago to say to myself in the night when she had gone away
from sight and I was lonely:--

"Father, on thy heart I lean
When the world comes not between."

* * *