seen or known all this before!
There was a strange familiarity either in these objects or in the
impression or spell they left upon him. He remembered the verses! Yes,
this was the "underbrush" which the poetess had described: the gloom
above and below, the light that seemed blown through it like the wind,
the suggestion of hidden life beneath this tangled luxuriance, which she
alone had penetrated,--all this was here. But, more than that, here was
the atmosphere that she had breathed into the plaintive melody of her
verse. It did not necessarily follow that Mr. Hamlin's translation of
her sentiment was the correct one, or that the ideas her verses had
provoked in his mind were at all what had been hers: in his easy
susceptibility he was simply thrown into a corresponding mood of
emotion and relieved himself with song. One of the verses he had already
associated in his mind with the rhythm of an old plantation melody, and
it struck his fancy to take advantage of the solitude to try its effect.
Humming to himself, at first softly, he at last grew bolder, and let his
voice drift away through the stark pillars of the sylvan colonnade till
it seemed to suffuse and fill it with no more effort than the light
which strayed in on either side. Sitting thus, his hat thrown a little
back from his clustering curls, the white neck and shoulders of his
horse uplifting him above the crested mass of fern, his red sash the one
fleck of color in their olive depths, I am afraid he looked much
more like the real minstrel of the grove than the unknown poetess who
transfigured it. But this, as has been already indicated, was Jack
Hamlin's peculiar gift. Even as he had previously outshone the vaquero
in his borrowed dress, he now silenced and supplanted a few fluttering
blue-jays--rightful tenants of the wood--with a more graceful and airy
presence and a far sweeter voice.

The open horizon towards the west had taken a warmer color from the
already slanting sun when Mr. Hamlin, having rested his horse, turned
to that direction. He had noticed that the wood was thinner there,
and, pushing forward, he was presently rewarded by the sound of far-off
wheels, and knew he must be near the high-road that the boy had spoken
of. Having given up his previous intention of crossing the stream, there
seemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant's advice
and take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave the
wood, halting o