think it best that his stay shall not be prolonged. At
first he seemed not only absorbed by his work and to enjoy the garden
and especially the river woods, but the trees and water rushing by.

A week ago a change came over him; he became morose and silent, and
yesterday when I was admiring, half aloud, the reflection of a beautiful
scarlet oak mirrored in the still backwater of the river, he paused in
the kneeling position in which he was loosening the grasp of a white
flowering dogwood, and first throwing out his arms and then beating his
chest with them, exclaimed--"Other good have trees and water than for
the eye to see; they can surely hang and drown the man the heart of whom
holds much sorrow, and that man is I!"

Of course I knew that it was something a little out of the ordinary
state of affairs that had sent a man of his capability to tramp about as
a vagrant sort of labourer, but I had no previous idea that melancholy
had taken such a grip upon him. Much do I prefer Larry, with periods of
hilarity ending in peaceful "shlape." Certain peoples have their
peculiar racial characteristics, but after all, love of an occasional
drink seems a more natural proposition than a tendency to suicide, while
as to the relative value of the labour itself, that is always an
individual not a racial matter.

I too am feeling the domestic lure of cooler weather. All the day I wish
to be in the open, but when the earlier twilight closes in, the house,
with its lamps, hearth fires, and voices, weaves a new spell about me,
though having once opened wide the door of outdoors it can never be
closed.

Do you remember the _Masque of Pandora_, and the mysterious chest?

"_Pandora_
Hast thou never
Lifted the lid?

_Epimetheus_
The oracle forbids.
Safely concealed there from all mortal eyes
Forever sleeps the secret of the Gods.
Seek not to know what they have hidden from thee
Till they themselves reveal it."

Bart was reading it aloud to me last night. Prose read aloud always
frets me, because one's mind travels so much faster than the spoken
words and arrives at the conclusion, even if not always the right one,
long before the printed climax is reached; but with good poetry it is
different--the thoughts are so crystallized that the sound of a
melodious voice liberates them more swiftly.

Verily Pandora's Chest has been opened this seaso