d familiar bushes and listen to the old sweet songs,
changeless through the years. If the big thistle is rooted out, where
shall the lark sparrow build her nest? If the dirt road is paved, how
shall the yellow-hammers have their sand-baths in the evening, while
the half grown rabbits frisk around them? Sweet the hours spent in
living along the old road--let my life be simpler, that I may spend
more time in living and less in getting a living. There are so many
things deemed essential that really are not necessary at all. One hour
of new thought is better than them all. Let the days be long enough
for the zest and joy of work, for the companionship of loved ones and
friends, for a little time loafing along the old road when the day's
work is done. Let me hear the sibilant sounds of the thrashers as they
settle to sleep in the thicket. Give me the fragrance of the milkweed
at evening. Let me see the sunset glow on the trunks of the trees, the
ruby tints lingering on the boulder brought down by the glaciers long
ago; the little bats that weave their way beneath the darkening arches
of the leafy roof, while the fire-flies are lighting their lamps in
the nave of the sylvan sanctuary. When the afterglow has faded and the
blur of night has come, give me the old, childlike faith and assurance
that tomorrow's sun shall rise again, and that by-and-by, in the same
sweet way, there shall break the first bright beams of Earth's Eternal
Easter morning.

[Illustration: "THE FRAGRANCE OF THE MILKWEED AT EVENING" (p. 54)]

VIII.--BY THE RIVERSIDE IN AUGUST

When morning broke, little wisps of mist, like curls of white smoke,
were drifting on the surface of the river as it journeyed through the
canyon of cliffs and trees, dark as the walls of night, toward the
valley where the widening sea of day was slowly changing from gray to
rosy gold. Caught in a cove where the water was still these little
wisps gathered together and crept in folds up the face of the cliff,
as if they fain would climb to the very top where the red cedars ran
like a row of battlements, twisting their stunted trunks over the
brink and hanging their dark foliage in a fringe eighty feet above the
water. But the cliff had for centuries defied all climbers, though it
gave footing here and there to a few friendly plants. At its base the
starry-rayed leaf-cup shed a heavy scent in the stillness of the moist
morning. Higher, at the entrance to a little cave, the ar