humanity. His house, the members of his family, the people of his
neighborhood, were meantime forgotten: he was not a mere dweller on
his farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons where the race
forever camps at large with its problems, joys, and sorrows.

He read his page, his hand dropped to his knee, his mind dropped its
responsibility; one of those intervals followed when the brain rests.
The look of the student left his face; over it began to play the soft
lights of the domestic affections. He had forgotten the world for his
own place in the world; the student had become the husband and
house-father. A few moments only; then he wheeled gravely to his work
again, his right hand took up the pen, his left hand went back to the
pictures.

The silence of the room seemed a guarded silence, as though he were
being watched over by a love which would not let him be disturbed.
(He had the reposeful self-assurance of a man who is conscious that he
is idolized.)

Matching the silence within was the stillness out of doors. An immense
oak tree stood just outside the windows. It was a perpetual reminder
of vanished woods; and when a windstorm tossed and twisted it, the
straining and grinding of the fibres were like struggles and outcries
for the wild life of old. This afternoon it brooded motionless, an
image of forest reflection. Once a small black-and-white sapsucker,
circling the trunk and peering into the crevices of the bark on a
level with the windows, uttered minute notes which penetrated into the
room like steel darts of sound. A snowbird alighted on the
window-sill, glanced familiarly in at the man, and shot up its crest;
but disappointed perhaps that it was not noticed, quoted its resigned