is host! Stopping the clocks when we went
in camp did not dislodge Time from the premises; rather did it open the
door to his entrance hours earlier than usual, when one of the chiefest
luxuries we promised ourselves was late sleeping.

Stretched on our wire-springed, downy cots (there is positively no
virtue in sleeping on hard beds, and Bart considers it an absolute
vice), there is a delicious period before sleep comes. Bats flit about
the rafters, and an occasional swallow twitters and shifts among the
beams as the particular nest it guarded grew high and difficult to mount
from the growth of the lusty brood within. The scuffle of little feet
over the rough floor brings indolent, half-indifferent guessing as to
which of the lesser four-foots they belonged. The whippoorwills down in
the river woods call until they drop off, one by one, and the timid
ditty of a singing mouse that lives under the floor by my cot is the
last message the sandman sends to close our eyes before sleep. And such
sleep! That first steel-blue starlit night in the open we said that we
meant to sleep and sleep it out, even if we lost a whole day by it. It
seemed but a moment after sleep had claimed us, when, struggling through
the heavy darkness, came far-away light strands groping for our eyes,
and soft, half-uttered music questioning the ear. Returning I opened my
eyes, and there was the sun struggling slowly through the screen of
white birches in Opie's wood lot, and scattering the night mists that
bound down the Opal Farm with heavy strands; the air was tense with
flitting wings, bird music rose, fell, and drifted with the mist, and it
was only half-past four! You cannot kill time, you see, by stopping
clocks--with nature day _Is_, beyond all dispute. In two days, by
obeying instead of opposing natural sun time, we had swung half round
the clock, only now and then imitating the habits of our four-footed
brothers that steal abroad in the security of twilight.

[Illustration: THE SCREEN OF WHITE BIRCHES.
Copyright, 1901, H. Hendrickson.]

_June 24._ Amos Opie, the carpenter, owner of Opal Farm, is now keeping
widower's hall in the summer kitchen thereof. A thin thread of smoke
comes idly from the chimney of the lean-to in the early morning, and at
evening the old man sits in the well-house porch reading his paper so
long as the light lasts, a hound of the ancient blue-spotted variety,
with heavy black and tan markings, keeping him company.