ss the moon, following the secret call that
guides them southward. In the calm brightness of winter sunshine,
filling sheltered copses with warmth and cheer, you will watch the
lingering blue-birds and robins and song-sparrows playing at summer,
while the chickadees and the juncos and the cross-bills make merry in
the windswept fields. In the lucent mornings of April you will hear your
old friends coming home to you, Phoebe, and Oriole, and Yellow-Throat,
and Red-Wing, and Tanager, and Cat-Bird. When they call to you and greet
you, you will understand that Nature knows a secret for which man has
never found a word--the secret that tells itself in song.

The third of the forest-vines is Wood-Magic. It bears neither flower nor
fruit. Its leaves are hardly to be distinguished from the leaves of the
other vines. Perhaps they are a little rounder than the Snowberry's,
a little more pointed than the Partridge-berry's; sometimes you might
mistake them for the one, sometimes for the other. No marks of warning
have been written upon them. If you find them it is your fortune; if you
taste them it is your fate.

For as you browse your way through the forest, nipping here and there a
rosy leaf of young winter-green, a fragrant emerald tip of balsam-fir, a
twig of spicy birch, if by chance you pluck the leaves of Wood-Magic and
eat them, you will not know what you have done, but the enchantment of
the tree-land will enter your heart and the charm of the wildwood will
flow through your veins.

You will never get away from it. The sighing of the wind through the
pine-trees and the laughter of the stream in its rapids will sound
through all your dreams. On beds of silken softness you will long for
the sleep-song of whispering leaves above your head, and the smell of
a couch of balsam-boughs. At tables spread with dainty fare you will be
hungry for the joy of the hunt, and for the angler's sylvan feast. In
proud cities you will weary for the sight of a mountain trail; in great
cathedrals you will think of the long, arching aisles of the woodland;
and in the noisy solitude of crowded streets you will hone after the
friendly forest.

This is what will happen to you if you eat the leaves of that little
vine, Wood-Magic. And this is what happened to Luke Dubois.

I

The Cabin by the Rivers

Two highways meet before the door, and a third reaches away to the
southward, broad and smooth and white. But there are no travellers
passi