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whole thought into some great enterprise.

The men who sit at home have neither beneficiaries nor heirs; they possess nothing but their poverty, and that vanishes with them when death makes up the impartial account. After all, I said to myself, no one is ever poor who has once been rich; for the real return of a great venture is in the expansion and enrichment of one's own nature; and that cannot fly from us as the shy bird happiness so often escapes into the upper sky whence it came to build its fragile nest in our hearts. To have done some great service and felt the thrill of it, is enough to remember when the hour is passed and the deed forgotten; to have poured one's whole life into some great affection is never to be impoverished again. After the beautiful face became first a beautiful memory and then a heavenly vision, the poet was never again alone; in all his arduous wanderings there was with

him one whose footfall in Paradise all the world has listened to hear. Love is the only synonym in any earthly speech for immortality; it has no past, for it carries all that it has been in its heart and it has no future, for it already realises its own completeness and finality. To have seen once the heart of a pure, loyal, and noble nature is to have gained an imperishable possession.

Just then the silence in which I sat was broken; the cuckoo flew out of his little door and chaunted twelve cheerful notes. "It makes all the difference in the world," I said to myself, "how you report the flight of time. You may have a hammer ring the hours for you on hard and resonant metal, or you may cage a bird and set the years to music." And I remembered how long that tiny song had broken on my ears; how it had blended with the first thrilling, articulate cry of life, and how it had kept record of hours of great agonies and joys. Through the darkness as the light, its cheerful song had set the days and years to an impartial music. Did I dream then, as I listened, before the dying

fire, to the echoes of the vanished years, that a bird flew out of Paradise, and, alone of all the heavenly brood, returned no more, but built its nest along the ways of men, seeking always for one to whom its divine song should be audible; and that, having heard that thrilling note, the chosen ones heard no other sound, but followed whithersoever the song led them, and knew that at the end it would not die out in the evening sky! "If Rosalind were here," I said to the fire as I covered the warm coals for the night" if Rosalind were here

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CHAPTER XXI

A GLIMPSE OF SPRING

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COOKING out of the study windows this morning, Rosalind noticed a sudden change in the group of willows on the hill. There was a tinge of fresh colour in the mass of twigs which we recog

nised as the earliest harbinger of spring. In the

sky there was a momentary softness of tone which turned the dial of thought forward on the instant, and we waited expectant for the reedy note that should tell us of the coming of the birds and the freshness of the early summer on the woods and hills. The illusion lasts but a moment, for the March winds are rising, and the gray clouds will soon overshadow the sky. But fancy has been loosened, and will not return to its wonted subjection to the work

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of the day. The subject one is studying is flat, stale, and unprofitable; one no sooner settles down to it than the fragrance of the apple blossom, borne from some silent field of memory or from some sunny orchard of the imagination, turns all the eager search for knowledge into ashes. When such a mood comes, as come it will when prophecies of spring are abroad, it is better to yield to the spell than to make a futile resistance.

There is a volume close at hand which fits the day and the mood. It is Richard Jefferies's "Field and Hedgerow," the last word of one through whose heart and hand

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