tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may
walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts. When the sun
shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here and
there with the gold that trickles through. There is nothing of the
accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched
and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil. They remain nurseries,
but they have the charm which no human care can alienate. The smell of
their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about
their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his
country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in
cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and
dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of
exemption from care. There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation;
no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him
good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and
was less intrusive than if he had not been there.

March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playing
the inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race has
played from the beginning of time. The other invalids who haunted the
forest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their several
prescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk that
prevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that the
forest-spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young drama.
He had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had met,
however little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their brief
separation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously operated
their reunion in response to the young man's longing, her will making
itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless
telegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun to