ngs which are
eternal. The trouble with sordid souls, if such there be, is that
they have never seen enough sunsets. People who live in places or
palaces where these are never seen have need to be born of noble
fathers and sweet mothers, to be carefully nurtured in hope and
aspiration and belief, or the world is the worse for them.

Long after the sun had gone and the evening was cool with
unclotted dew, the fires of the melting burned high in the upper
air and the gold that had been thin vapor seemed to condense into
clouds that glowed copper-red with the molten metal and cooled and
dropped into the distant hills. No wonder the miners go ever
westward for the precious gold, to Colorado and Nevada and
California, to Sitka and the Copper River, to Anvil City and the
Nome beach and across the straits to Siberia. Never a clear night
falls but they see the alchemy at work and the precious element
going down in dust and nuggets and wide lodes behind the peaks and
into the canons just beyond.

Usually it is not until the gold begins to pass that I notice the
nighthawk, though he may have been circling and crying "peent,
peent" all the afternoon. If you can catch sight of him before the
light fades too much you will see the white bar which crosses each
wing beneath and looks exactly like a hole, as if the bird had
transparencies in his pinions as has the polyphemus moth. Many a
summer afternoon I have seen nighthawks circling erratically above
Boston Common, and there their cry has sounded like a plaint. No
doubt these birds fly there by choice and bring up their young on
the tops of Back Bay buildings because they prefer the place, but
this has not prevented a tinge of melancholy in their voices. Like
many another city dweller they may take habit for preference, but
the longing for the freedom of the woods, though unconscious, will
voice itself some way. The nighthawk's cry, falling from the high
gold of the waning sunset to dusky pasture glades, has no note of
melancholy but a soothing sleepiness about it that makes it a
lullaby of contentment. I rarely hear him after dark. I fancy he
goes higher and higher to keep in the soft radiance of the fading
glow. Only once have I ever seen one sky-coasting, falling like a
dark star from a height where he seemed but a mote in the gold, a
smaller, point that the green glint of a real star that had just
come through. It was as if his wings had lost their hold on the
thinner air of