sing with him. From far away comes the chant of a pine-wood sparrow. I
can just hear it.

This is a place for dreams and quietness. Nothing else seems worth the
having. Let us feel no more the fever of life. Surely they are the wise
who seek Nirvana; who insist not upon themselves, but wait absorption
--reabsorption--into the infinite. The dead have the better part. I
think of the stirring, adventurous man who built these walls and dug
these canals. His life was full of action, full of journeyings and
fightings. Now he is at peace, and his works do follow him--into the
land of forgetfulness. Blessed are the dead. Blessed, too, are the bees,
the birds, the butterflies, and the lizards. Next to the dead, perhaps,
they are happy. And I also am happy, for I too am under the spell. To me
also the sun and the air are sweet, and I too, for to-day at least, am
careless of the world and all its doings.

So I sat dreaming, when suddenly there was a stir in the grass at my
feet. A snake was coming straight toward me. Only the evening before a
cracker had filled my ears with stories of "rattlers" and "moccasins."
He seemed to have seen them everywhere, and to have killed them as one
kills mosquitoes. I looked a second time at the moving thing in the
grass. It was clothed in innocent black; but, being a son of Adam, I
rose with involuntary politeness to let it pass. An instant more, and it
slipped into the masonry at my side, and I sat down again. It had been
out taking the sun, and had come back to its hole in the wall. How like
the story of my own day,--of my whole winter vacation! Nay, if we choose
to view it so, how like the story of human life itself!

As I started homeward, leaving the mill and the cabin behind me, some
cattle were feeding in the grassy road. At sight of my umbrella (there