characters are barefaced plagiarisms from the book of Genesis! Oh! to
find an author with originality!"

One spring I went a walking tour in the country. It was a glorious
spring. Not the sort of spring they give us in these miserable times,
under this shameless government--a mixture of east wind, blizzard,
snow, rain, slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet and thunder-storms--but a
sunny, blue-sky'd, joyous spring, such as we used to have regularly
every year when I was a young man, and things were different.

It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for those golden days;
and as I wandered through the waking land, and saw the dawning of the
coming green, and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening
each day beneath the kisses of the sun, and looked up at the proud old
mother trees, dandling their myriad baby buds upon their strong fond
arms, holding them high for the soft west wind to caress as he passed
laughing by, and marked the primrose yellow creep across the carpet of
the woods, and saw the new flush of the field and saw the new light on
the hills, and heard the new-found gladness of the birds, and heard
from copse and farm and meadow the timid callings of the little
new-born things, wondering to find themselves alive, and smelt the
freshness of the earth, and felt the promise in the air, and felt a
strong hand in the wind, my spirit rose within me. Spring had come to
me also, and stirred me with a strange new life, with a strange new
hope I, too, was part of nature, and it was spring! Tender leaves and
blossoms were unfolding from my heart. Bright flowers of love and
gratitude were opening round its roots. I felt new strength in all my
limbs. New blood was pulsing through my veins. Nobler thoughts and
nobler longings were throbbing through my brain.