tangible and temporal to the truths which are spiritual and
eternal; from the beauty of the concrete to the beauty of the
abstract, onward along the road of beauty and farther up the heights
of truth until our admiration for the beauty of the sunrise, the snow
crystal, the graceful spray of the trees in winter, the exquisite
order and harmony of the universe from the orbit of the largest planet
to the flow of life in the tiniest leaf, develops into a lasting love
for beauty in life and in character; and still farther up the heights
into an atmosphere of intelligent, rational, genuine love for the
Great First Cause of all beauty. As the heart opens to receive the
beauty of the world, as the mind and soul strive, like the plants, for
the highest development, so is the world redeemed from error and crime
and the perfection of the race is attained. If one soul finds this
truth more quickly and easily here amid the trees and flowers, for him
is the old road greater than religious dogmas or social systems.

* * * * *

Always beautiful and interesting, in these long days of mid-July the
old road is at its best. No length of day can measure its loveliness
or encompass its charm. Very early in the morning there is a faint
rustle of the leaves, a delicate flutter through the woods as if the
awakening birds are shaking out their wings. Shrubs and bushes and
trunks of trees have ghostly shapes in the few strange moments that
are neither the darkness nor the dawn. As the light steals through the
woods their forms grow less grotesque. In the half light a phoebe
begins her shrill song. A blue-jay screams. The quail sounds his first
"Bob White." Brown thrashers in the thicket--it is past their time of
singing--respond with a strange, sibilant sound, a mingled hiss and
whistle, far different from his ringing songs of May, now only
memories; different also from her scoldings when she was disturbed on
her nest and from her tender crooning calls to her babies during June.

As the light increases waves of delicate color appear in the sky to
the northeast, and by and by the sun's face appears over the tops of
the trees. He shoots arrows of pale flame through the woods. In the
clearing the trunks of the trees are like cathedral pillars, and the
sunlight comes down in slanting rays as if the openings among the
tree-tops were windows and the blue haze beneath the incense of the
morning mass. Black-capped precen