f touched, perhaps saddened, he knows not
how or why.

Now again is the old mystery and deep secret of life forced upon
thought: "Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it
abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit." When
the tide was at the flood it was enough to breathe the air and listen
to the magical music of advancing life; but now, when the tide begins
to recede and leave the vast shores bare and silent, one must think,
whether he will or not. Nature, that was careless poet, flower-crowned
and buoyant with the promise of eternal youth, turns teacher, and will
not suffer us to escape the deeper truths, the more searching and awful
lessons. As the physical falls away the spiritual comes into clear and
compelling distinctness. Who that goes abroad in these quiet days, and
feels the subtle change from the grosser to the ethereal which pervades
the very air, can escape the threefold thought of Life, Death, and
Immortality?

The silence that has already fallen upon the jubilant voices of summer
will extend and deepen day by day until even the thoughtless babbling
of the brooks ceases and the hush becomes universal. The earth, that a
little time ago was producing such an endless variety of forms of life
and beauty, will give birth to a myriad thoughts, deep, spiritual, and
far-reaching; translating into the language of spirit the vast movement
of the year, and completing its mysterious cycle with a vision of the
sublime ends for which Nature stands, and to the consummation of which
all things are borne forward. And when the time is ripe there will
come a transformation like the descent of the heavens upon the earth,
flooding the dying world with unspeakable splendours; the sunset which
closes the long summer day and leaves through the night of winter the
fadeless promise of another dawn.

Chapter XX

A Memory of Summer

In the pine woods, or floating under overhanging branches on the silent
and almost motionless river, I have had visions of my study fire during
the summer months, and, now that I find myself once more within the
cheerful circle of its glow, the time that has passed since it was
lighted for the last time in the spring seems like a long, delightful
dream. I recall those charming days, some of them full of silence and
repose from dawn to sunset, some of them ripe with effort and
adventure, with a keen delight in the feeling of possession which comes
with