was rejoicing boisterously in its freedom. The meadow and pasture
lands showed the tender green of the first grass life. Pussy willow
buds were swelling and over the orchard and the wood a filmy veil of
summer color was dropped as though by fairy hands. In the cherry tree,
a pair of brown birds, just returning from their southern home, were
discussing the merits of the nearby hedge as a building site: the
madam bird insisting, as women will, that the beautiful traditions of
the spot made it, for home building, peculiarly desirable. It was a
well known fact, said she, that brown birds had builded there for no
one knows how many ages. Even in the far away city, the man felt the
season in the air. The reek of city odors could not altogether drown
the subtle perfume that betrayed the near presence of the spring. As
though the magic of the budding, sprouting, starting, time of the year
placed him under its spell, the man went back to the springtime of his
life--back into his Yesterdays.

Once again, he walked under the clear skies of childhood. Once again,
he lived in the blessed, blessed, days when he had nothing to
forget--when his mind and life were as a mountain brook that, clear
and pure, from the spring of its birth runs ever onward, outward,
turning never back, pausing never to form stagnant, poisonous, pools.
And there it was--in his Yesterdays--in the pure sunlight of
childhood--that he found new intellectual faith--that he came to a
right understanding of the real wisdom of Ignorance.

The intellectual giants of his Yesterdays--those wise ones upon whose
learning he looked with childish awe--who were they? Famous scholars
who lectured in caps and gowns and words of many syllables upon themes
of mighty interest to themselves? Students who, in their laboratory
worlds, discovered many wonderful things that were not so and solved