and subtle perfume drifts around
us. The vines with the tender grape give a good smell. And evermore as
its enchantment is cast about us we are as once we were when first we
came beneath its spell; we are by the smokehouse at the old home place;
we stand in shoes whose copper toes wink and glitter in the sunlight,
a gingham apron sways in the soft breeze, and on the green, upspringing
turf dances the shadow of a tasseled cap. Life was all before us then.
Please God, it is not all behind us now. Please God, our best and wisest
days are yet to come the days when we shall do the work that is worthy
of us. Dear one, mother of my children here and Yonder--and Yonder--the
best and wisest days are yet to come. Arise, my love, my fair one, and
come away.

THE SWIMMING-HOLE

It is agreed by all, I think, that the two happiest periods in a man's
life are his boyhood and about ten years from now. We are exactly in the
position described in the hymn:

"Lo! On a narrow neck of land
'Twixt two unbounded seas we stand,
And cast a wishful eye."*

*[I am told, on good authority, that this last line of the
three belongs to another hymn. As it is just what I want to
say, I'm going to let it stand as it is.]

If I remember right, the hymn went to the tune of "Ariel," and I can see
John Snodgrass, the precentor, sneaking a furtive C from his pitch-pipe,
finding E flat and then sol, and standing up to lead the singing,
paddling the air gently with: Down, left, sing. Well, no matter about
that now. What I am trying to get at, is that we have all a lost Eden
in the past and a Paradise Regained in the future. 'Twixt two unbounded
seas of happiness we stand on the narrow and arid sand-spit of the
present and cast a wishful eye. In hot weather particularly the wishful
eye, when directed toward the lost Eden of boyhood, lights on and
lingers near the Old Swimming-hole.

I suppose boys do grow up into a reasonable enjoyment of their faculties
in big seaside cities and on inland farms where there is no accessible
body of water larger than a wash-tub, but I prefer to believe that the
majority of our adult male population in youth went in swimming in the
river up above the dam, where the big sycamore spread out its roots
a-purpose for them to climb out on without muddying their feet. Some, I
suppose, went in at the Copperas Banks below town, where the current had
dug a hole that was "over head an