porch to the clear-watered river, and they
sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively,
defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count
years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the
primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but
joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the
trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless--has
never even wearied. The blossoms told this secret now in quiet triumph
over the denials of ancient oaks that towered above them and murmured
solemn falsities in their tops about the incredible oldness of things.

There was the star-shaped bloodroot, with its ten or a dozen petals of
waxen white set with jewel-like precision about a centre of dead gold.
There was the less formal phlox of a pinkish purple; deer's-tongue,
white and yellow; frail anemones, both pink and white; small but
stately violets, and the wake-robin with its wine-red centre among long
green leaves. There was a dogwood in the act of unfolding its little
green tents that would presently be snow-white, and a plum tree ruffled
with tiny flowers of a honied fragrance.

With a fine Japanese restraint, Clem had placed a single bough of these
in a dull-colored vase on my out-of-doors breakfast table.

All these were to say that the soul of the world is ageless, and that
time is but a cheap device to measure our infirmities. Above, the trees
were hinting that life might still be lived acceptably, as in Eden days;
though they seemed to suspect that the stage of it to which they were
amazedly awakening must be at least the autumn, and timidly clothed
themselves accordingly. The elm, the first big tree to stir in its
sleep, showed tiny, curled leaflets of a doubting, yellowish green; and
the later moving oaks were frankly sceptical, one glowing faintly brown
and crimson, another silvery gray and pink. They would need at least ten
more days to convince them into downright summer greenery, even though
slender-throated doves already mated in their tops with a perfect
confidence.

It was an early morning hour, when it was easy to believe in the perfect
fitness of Little Arcady's name; an hour in a time when the
Potts-troubled waters had been mercifully stilled by the hand of God; an
hour when the spirit of each Little Arcadian might share to its own
fulness in the large serenity of the ageless world-soul.