d
them. The wind blew over pleasantly and it was a curiously protected and
hidden place, sheltered and quiet, with its one small crop of cider
apples dropping ungathered to the ground, and unharvested there, except
by hurrying black ants and sticky, witless little snails.

I suppose my feeling toward this place was like that about a ruin, only
this seemed older than a ruin. I could not hear my horse's foot-falls,
and an apple startled me when it fell with a soft thud, and I watched it
roll a foot or two and then stop, as if it knew it never would have
anything more to do in the world. I remembered the Enchanted Palace and
the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, and it seemed as if I were on the way
to it, and this was a corner of that palace garden. The horse listened
and stood still, without a bit of restlessness, and when we heard the
far cry of a bird she looked round at me, as if she wished me to notice
that we were not alone in the world, after all. It was strange, to be
sure, that people had lived there, and had had a home where they were
busy, and where the fortunes of life had found them; that they had
followed out the law of existence in its succession of growth and
flourishing and failure and decay, within that steadily narrowing circle
of trees.

The relationship of untamed nature to what is tamed and cultivated is a
very curious and subtle thing to me; I do not know if every one feels it
so intensely. In the darkness of an early autumn evening I sometimes
find myself whistling a queer tune that chimes in with the crickets'
piping and the cries of the little creatures around me in the garden. I
have no thought of the rest of the world. I wonder what I am; there is a
strange self-consciousness, but I am only a part of one great existence
which is called nature. The life in me is a bit of all life, and where I
am happiest is where I find that which is next of kin to me, in friends,
or trees, or hills, or seas, or beside a flower, when I turn back more
than once to look into its face.

The world goes on year after year. We can use its forces, and shape and
mould them, and perfect this thing or that, but we cannot make new
forces; we only use the tools we find to carve the wood we find. There
is nothing new; we discover and combine and use. Here is the wild
fruit,--the same fruit at heart as that with which the gardener wins his
prize. The world is the same world. You find a diamond, but the diamond
was there a thous