natives from earthly clods to the clouds, and where beckoning hands
strove vainly to inspire them with heavenly hopes; around them,
glistening in the sunlight, the marble slabs where sleep the rude
forefathers of the hamlet, some mute inglorious Miltons who came from
England in the early sixties, whose tombstones are pierced by rifle
bullets fired at the maraudering red skins. These are the cities of
the dead, far more populous than the town of the living.

Nearer, the willowy brook that turns the mill; to the south the dense
pine woods, peopled in our imaginations, with fairy elves, owls, and
hobgoblins--now, alas, owing to the rapacity of the sawmills, naught
but a howling wilderness of stumps and underbrush.

Directly below me, stands our half-century old house with its eaves
sloping to the ground, down which generations of boys had ruined their
pants in hilarious coasting; near by, the ancient well-swipe, and the
old oaken bucket which rose from the well; beyond this, of course,
as usual, the piggery and hennery to contaminate the water and breed
typhoid fever, and in the house cellar, the usual dampness from the
hillside to supply us all with rheumatism and chills.

There existed apparently in the early dawn of the nineteenth century,
an unwritten law which required the farmers to violate all the laws of
sanitation, and then to ascribe all ills the flesh is heir to, to the
mysterious will of an inscrutable Providence whose desire it was to
make the heart better by the sorrows of the countenance, and to save
the soul from hell by the punishment of the body. Vegetables were
allowed to rot in the cellars, and to make everybody sick with
their noxious odors so that we might not be too much wedded to this
transitory existence. Pork, beans, and cabbage must be devoured in
enormous quantities just before going to bed for the purpose of
inspiring midnight groans and prayers to be delivered from the pangs
of the civil war in the inner man.

This moralizing is inspired by the pessimism of disenchanted age; but
on that beautiful morning of the long ago, naught occurred to me
save the wedlock of earth and heaven: I was near to nature's heart,
listening to the ecstatic songs of the robins, the orioles and
sweetest of all the bobolink.

"Oh, winged rapture, feathered soul of spring:
Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters, all in one,
Pipe blown through by the warm, mild breath of June,
Shepherding her white flocks o