ment in its passage, as
yet unmentioned, which I have kept for the close because to me it is
the subtle climax of the resurrection season. It usually comes in
April for us, though sometimes earlier. The time is evening, always
evening, just after supper, when a frail memory of sunset still
lingers in the west and the air is warm. I go out hatless upon the
veranda, thinking of other things, and suddenly I am aware of the song
of the frogs! There are laughing voices in the street, the tinkle of a
far-off piano, the pleasant sounds of village life come outdoors with
the return of spring; and buoying up, permeating these other sounds
comes the ceaseless, shrill chorus of the frogs, seemingly from out of
the air and distance, beating in waves on the ear. Why this first frog
chorus so thrills me I cannot explain, nor what dim memories it wakes.
But the peace of it steals over all my senses, and I walk down into
the dusk and seclusion of my garden, amid the sweet odors of new earth
and growing things, where the song comes up to me from the distant
meadow making the garden-close sweeter still, the air yet more warm
and fragrant, the promise of spring more magical. The garden then is
very intimate and dear, it brings me into closer touch with the
awakening earth about me, and all the years I dwelt a prisoner in
cities are but as the shadow of a dream.

[Illustration]

_The Bubble, Reputation_

A great dramatist is authority for the statement that--

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.

That is no doubt in a measure true; yet it would be grossly unfair to
blame personally certain great ones of the past for the evil that has
lived after them and borne their names. For instance, it may be
doubted whether Louis XIV of France was all that he should have been.
His private life would hardly have escaped censure in Upper Montclair,
N. J., or West Newton, Mass., and his public acts were not always
calculated to promote social justice and universal brotherhood. But to
blame him for all the gilt furniture which has ever since stood around
the walls of hotel ballrooms and borne his name is a libel even on
that lax and luxurious monarch. Yet such is his fate. You who are
familiar with history, I who know next to nothing about it, are alike
in this--when we hear the words _Louis XIV_ we do not think of a great
monarch with a