The place to which the good people carried the gift of the
earthquake--carried him with much anxiety and more exultation--had no
very distinctive features. It had many fields in grass, many in crop,
and some lying fallow--all softly undulating. It had some trees, and
everywhere hedges dividing fields whose strange shapes witnessed to a
complicated history, of which few could tell anything. Here and there
in the hollows between the motionless earth-billows, flowed, but did
not seem to flow, what they called a brook. But the brooks there were
like deep soundless pools without beginning or end. There was no life,
no gaiety, no song in them, only a sullen consent to exist. That at
least is how they impress one accustomed to real brooks, lark-like,
always on the quiver, always on the move, always babbling and gabbling
and gamboling, always at their games, always tossing their pebbles
about, and telling them to talk. A man that loved them might say there
was more in the silence of these, than in the speech of those; but
what silence can be better than a song of delight that we are, that we
were, that we are to be! The stillness may be full of solemn fish,
mysterious as itself, and deaf with secrets; but blessed is the brook
that lets the light of its joy shine.

Dull as the place must seem in this my description, it was the very
country for the boy. He would come into more contact with its modest
beauty in a day than some of us would in a year. Nobody quite knows
the beauty of a country, especially of a quiet country, except one who
has been born in it, or for whom at least childhood and boyhood and
youth have opened door after door into the hidden phases of its
life. There is no square yard on the face of the earth but some one
can in part understand what God meant in making it; while the same
changeful skies canopy the most picturesque and the dullest
landscapes; the same winds wake and blow over desert and pasture land,