ollow the departed a
little way into the shades.

Again Maria asked herself:--"Why stay here, to toil and suffer
thus? Why? ..." And when she found no answer, it befell at length
that out of the silence and the night voices arose.

No miraculous voices were these; each of us bears them when he goes
apart and withdraws himself far enough to escape from the petty
turmoil of his daily life. But they speak more loudly and with
plainer accents to the simple-hearted, to those who dwell among the
great northern woods and in the empty places of the earth. While yet
Maria was dreaming of the city's distant wonders the first voice
brought murmuringly to her memory a hundred forgotten charms of the
land she wished to flee.

The marvel of the reappearing earth in the springtime after the long
months of winter ... The dreaded snow stealing away in prankish
rivulets down every slope; the tree-roots first resurgent, then the
mosses drenched with wet, soon the ground freed from its burden
whereon one treads with delighted glances and sighs of happiness
like the sick man who feels glad life returning to his veins ...
Later yet, the birches, alders, aspens swelling into bud; the laurel
clothing itself in rosy bloom ... The rough battle with the soil a
seeming holiday to men no longer condemned to idleness; to draw the
hard breath of toil from morn till eve a gracious favour ...

--The cattle, at last set free from their shed, gallop to the
pasture and glut themselves with the fresh grass. All the new-born
creatures--the calves, the fowls, the lambs, gambol in the sun and
add daily to their stature like the hay and the barley. The poorest
farmer sometimes halts in yard or field, hands in pockets, and
tastes the great happiness of knowing that the sun's heat, the warm
rain, the earth's unstinted alchemy--every mighty force of
nature--is working as a humble slave for him ... for him.

--And then, the surnmertide; the glory of sunny noons, the heated
quivering air that blurs the horizon and the outline of the forest,
the flies swarming and circling in the sun's rays, and but three
hundred paces from the house the rapids and the fall--white foam
against dark water--the mere sight of it filling one with a
delicious coolness. In its due time the harvest; the grain that
gives life heaped into the barns; then autumn and soon the returning
winter ... But here was the marvel of it, that the winter seemed
no longer abhorrent or terrifying; it