ly spot, my old garden, lovelier, perhaps, than when
it was in its golden prime, when its hedges were faultlessly trimmed and
its walks were edged with neat flower borders, when their smooth
flagging-stones showed never a weed, and even the little heaps of earth
piled up, grain by grain, by the industrious ants, were swept away each
morning by the industrious broom. Then human life centred here; now it
is very far away. All the sounds of the outside world come faintly to
this place and take on its quality of quiet,--the lowing of cows in the
pastures, the shouts of men in the fields, the deep, vibrant note of the
railroad train which goes singing across distances where its rattle and
roar fail to penetrate. It is very still here. Even the birds are
quieter, and the crickets and the katydids less boisterous. The red
squirrels move warily through the tree-tops with almost a chastened air,
the black-and-gold butterflies flutter indolently about the heads of
the phlox, a hummingbird, flashing green, hovers about some belated
blossom-heads of the scarlet bee-balm, and then, as if to point the
stillness, alights on an apple twig, looking, when at rest, so very
small! Only the cicada, as he rustles clumsily about with his paper
wings against the flaking bark and yellowing leaves of an old apple
tree, seems unmindful of the spell of silence that holds the place.

And the garden is mine now--mine because I have found it, and every one
else, as I like to believe, has forgotten it. Next it is a grove of big
old trees. Would they not have been cut down years ago if any one had
remembered them? And on the other side is a meadow whose thick grass,
waist-high, ought to have been mowed last June and gathered into some
dusky, fragrant barn. But it is forgotten, like the garden, and will go
leisurely to seed out there in the sun; the autumn winds will sweep it
and the winter snow will mat down its dried tangle.

Forgotten--and as I lie in the long grass, drowsy with the scent of the
hedge and the phlox, I seem only a memory myself. If I stay too long I
shall forget to go away, and no one will remember to find me. In truth,
I feel not unwilling that it should be so. Could there be a better
place? "Escaped from old gardens"! Ah, foolish, foolish flowers! If I
had the happiness to be born in an old garden, I would not escape. I
would stay there, and dream there, forever!

IX

The Country Road

On a June day, years ago, I was wa