though brick pavements have been our chosen road this many a year. We
follow the market, we buy and sell, and even run across the sea, to fit
us with new armor for the soul, to guard it from the hurts of years;
but ever do we keep the calendar of this one spring of life. Some
unheard angelus summons us to days of feast and mourning; it may be the
joy of the fresh-springing willow, or the nameless pain responsive to
the croaking of frogs, in the month when twilights are misty, and waves
of world-sorrow flood in upon the heart, we know not why. All those
trembling half-thoughts of the sleep of the year and its awakening,--we
have not escaped them by leaving the routine that brought them forth.
We know when the first violets are blowing in the woods, and we paint
for ourselves the tasselling of the alder and the red of maple-buds. We
taste still the sting of checkerberry and woodsy flavor of the fragrant
birch. When fields of corn are shimmering in the sun, we know exactly
how it would seem to run through those dusty aisles, swept by that
silken drapery, and counselled in whispers from the plumy tops so far
above our heads. The ground-sparrow's nest is not strange to us; no,
nor the partridge's hidden treasure within the wood. We can make
pudding-bags of live-forever, dolls' bonnets, "trimmed up to the
nines," out of the velvet mullein leaf, and from the ox-eyed daisies,
round, cap-begirt faces, smiling as the sun. All the homely secrets of
rural life are ours: the taste of pie, cinnamon-flavored, from the
dinner-pails at noon; the smell of "pears a-b'ilin'," at that happiest
hour when, in the early dusk, we tumble into the kitchen, to find the
table set and the stove redolent of warmth and savor. "What you got for
supper?" we cry,--question to be paralleled in the summer days by
"What'd you have for dinner?" as, famished little bears, we rush to the
dairy-wheel, to feed ravenously on the cold, delicious fragments of the
meal eaten without us.