into a wreath of golden butterflies with permission to follow spring round
and round the earth.

And that brings me to another part of my confession. You are aware that I
do not really know _you_, only your mind. The time I saw you in New York
does not count. For upon that occasion we only ran an editorial handicap
just to try each other's intellectual paces, did we not? But when you
ventured boldly down here upon my own heath--oh! that was a different
matter. I meant to be as brave as a Douglas in his hall. You should not
ride across my drawbridge and away again till I knew _you_. Well, you know
the dull usual way of discovering what and who a stranger is, by asking
his opinions or by classifying his face and expression according to
biological records. Now, a man's features are only his great-grand
somebody's modified or intensified, and his opinions, as in your case, may
not represent him but his mental fallacies. So I invented a test of my
own. I tried a man by a jury of my trees, not your peers exactly, but
friends of mine who have become to me strong standards of excellence and
virtue and repose in human nature. Dear Enemy, I coaxed you into my little
heart-shaped forest, which you remember lies like a big lover's wreath on
the Morningtown road beyond my father's church. And behold! it was as if
we had come home together. We touched hands with the green boughs in
friendly greeting. There was nothing to be said, no place now for a
difference between us. For the rights and wrongs of the world did not
reach beyond the shady rim of the silence there. Goodness and fidelity was
the ground we trod upon, and we were native to it. Yet it was the first
time I ever entered a little into sympathy with the exalted cruelty of
your spiritual nature. For in the forest, ever present, is the intimation
of Nature's indifference to pain. There is no charity in a commonwealth of
trees. They live, decay, and die, and there is no sign of compassion
anywhere. It is terrible, but there is a Spartan beauty in the fact.

But suddenly, as we sat there in the sweet green twilight, the thought
pierced me like a pang that after all you are more nearly related to the
life of the forest than I am. I merely love it, but you are like it in the
cold, ruthless, upward aspiration of your soul. I long for a word with the
trees, but you are so near and kin that your silence is speech. And then I
asked myself this question: "What is the good, where is th