sojourn of the sweetest summer in the world, and I am always impatient to
show it to strangers.

We climbed the meadow wall and passed through a stretch of woods to a path
leading down to the shore, and, as we loitered along in the tender gloom
of the forest, the music of the hermit-thrushes rang all round us like
crystal bells, like silver flutes, like the drip of fountains, like the
choiring of still-eyed cherubim. We stopped from time to time and
listened, while the shy birds sang unseen in their covert of shadows; but
we did not speak till we emerged from the trees and suddenly stood upon
the naked knoll overlooking the lake.

Then I explained: "The woods used to come down to the shore here, and we
had their mystery and music to the water's edge; but last winter the owner
cut the timber off. It looks rather ragged now." I had to recognize the
fact, for I saw the Altrurian staring about him over the clearing in a
kind of horror. It was a squalid ruin, a graceless desolation, which not
even the pitying twilight could soften. The stumps showed their hideous
mutilation everywhere; the brush had been burned, and the fires had
scorched and blackened the lean soil of the hill-slope and blasted it with
sterility. A few weak saplings, withered by the flames, drooped and
straggled about; it would be a century before the forces of nature could
repair the waste.

"You say the owner did this?" said the Altrurian. "Who is the owner?"

"Well, it does seem too bad," I answered, evasively. "There has been a
good deal of feeling about it. The neighbors tried to buy him off before
he began the destruction, for they knew the value of the woods as an
attraction to summer-boarders; the city cottagers, of course, wanted to