e
experience of a tea-taster compared to that of one who sits in cozy and
irresponsible enjoyment of the cup her friend hands her.

And so there always comes a time in the spring when I must go to my
Yellow Valley. A car ride, a walk on through plain little suburbs, a
scramble across fields to a seldom-used railway track, a swing out along
the ties, then off across more fields, over a little ridge, and--there!
Oh, the soft glory of color! We are at the west end of a miniature
valley, full of afternoon sunlight slanting across a level blur of
yellows and browns. On one side low brown hills enfold it, on the other
runs a swift little river, whose steep farther bank is overhung with
hemlocks and laurel in brightening spring green. It is a very tiny
valley,--one could almost throw a stone across it,--and the whole bottom
is filled with waving grass, waist-high, of a wonderful pale straw
color; last year's grass, which the winter snows never seem to mat
down, thick-set with the tall brown stalks of last year's goldenrod and
mullein and primrose. The trees and bushes are dwarf oaks, with their
old leafage still clinging in tawny masses, and willows, with their
bunches of slim, yellow shoots. Even the little river is yellow-brown,
from the sand and pebbles and leaves of its bed, and the sun, as it
slants down the length of the valley, wraps it in a warm, yellow haze.

I call the valley mine, for no one else seems to know it. The long grass
is never cut, but left to wave its glory of yellow all through the fall
and winter and spring. There is a little footpath running through it,
but I never see any one on it. I often wonder who makes all the
footpaths I know, where no one ever seems to pass. Is it rabbits, or
ghosts? Whoever they may be, in this case they do not trouble me, and
the valley is as much mine as though I had cut it out of a mediaeval
romance.

It is always very quiet here. At least it seems so, though full of
sound, as the world always is. But its sounds are its own; perhaps that
is the secret; the rustle of the oak leaves as the wind fumbles among
them; the swish-swish of the long dry grasses, which can be heard only
if one sits down in their midst, very still; the light, purling sounds
of the river; the soft gush of water about some bending branch as its
tip catches and drags in the shifting current. The winds lose a little
of their fierceness as they drop into the valley, and they seem to have
left behind the