ble fragrance;
the flowering bay is the breath of summer in South Carolina. He
sniffed the familiar odor, and listened to a redbird's whistle, and
to a mocking-bird echoing it; and to the fiddling of grasshoppers,
the whispers of trees, the quiet, soft movement of the swamp water.
The long thoughts that came to him in the open crossed his mind as
clouds cross the sky, idly, moving slowly, breaking up and drifting
with the wind. A bee buzzed about a spike of blue lobelia; ants
moved up and down the trunk of the oak-tree; birds and butterflies
came and went. With his hands under his head, Peter lay so
motionless that a great brown water-snake glided upon a branch not
ten feet distant, overhanging a brown pool whose depths a spear of
sunlight pierced. The young man had a curious sense of personal
detachment, such as comes upon one in isolated places. He felt
himself a part of the one life of the universe, one with the
whistling redbird, the toiling ants, the fluttering butterflies, the
chirping grasshoppers, the great brown snake, the trees, the water.
The earth breathed audibly against his ear. He sensed the awefulness
and beauty of this oneness of all things, and the immortality of
that oneness; and in comparison the littleness of his own personal
existence. With piercing clarity he saw how brief a time he had to
work and to experience the beauty and wonder of his universe. Then,
healingly, dreamlessly, wholesomely, he fell asleep, to wake at
sunset with a five-mile tramp ahead of him.

Long before he reached Riverton the dark had fallen. It was an
evening of many stars. The wind carried with it the salty taste of
the sea, and the smell of the warm country.

A light burned in his own dining-room, which was sitting-room as
well, and a much pleasanter room than his mother had known, for
books had accumulated in it, lending it that note books alone can
give. He had added a reading-lamp and a comfortable arm-chair. Emma
Campbell's flowers, planted in anything from a tomato-can to an old
pot, filled the windows with gay blossoms.

Peter found his supper on a covered tray on the kitchen table. Emma
herself had gone off to church. The Seventh Commandment had no
meaning for Emma, she was hazy as to mine and thine, but she clung
to church membership. She was a pious woman, given to strenuous
spells of "wrastlin' wid de Speret."

Peter fetched his tray into the dining-room, and had just touched a
match to the spirit kettle,