ears, like a current bearing him away into sweet sleep and dreams in a
land of pleasant adventures. Only in youth come such dreams. Later on
the sophisticated mind, left to its own guidance in the night, wanders
amid the complexities of life, calling up in confusion scenes long
forgotten or repented of, images only registered by a sub-conscious
process, dreams to perplex, irritate, and excite.

In the morning the same continuous murmur seemed to awake him into a
peaceful world. Through the open window came in the scents of summer,
the freshness of a new day. How sweet and light was the air! It was
indeed the height of summer. The corn, not yet tasseled, stood in green
flexible ranks, moved by the early breeze. In the river-meadows haying
had just begun. Fields of timothy and clover, yellowing to ripeness,
took on a fresh bloom from the dew, and there was an odor of new-mown
grass from the sections where the scythes had been. He heard the call
of the crow from the hill, the melody of the bobolink along the
meadow-brook; indeed, the birds of all sorts were astir, skimming along
the ground or rising to the sky, keeping watch especially over the garden
and the fruit-trees, carrying food to their nests, or teaching their
young broods to fly and to chirp the songs of summer. And from the
woodshed the shrill note of the scythe under the action of the
grindstone. No such vivid realization of summer as that.

Philip stole out the unused front door without disturbing the family.
Whither? Where would a boy be likely to go the first thing? To the
barn, the great cavernous barn, its huge doors now wide open, the stalls
vacant, the mows empty, the sunlight sifting in through the high shadowy
spaces. How much his life had been in that barn! How he had stifled and
scrambled mowing hay in those lofts! On the floor he had hulled heaps of
corn, thrashed oats with a flail--a noble occupation--and many a rainy