Part 23

As I write, across the ice-bound months comes the memory of that spring twilight when I last heard the hermit thrush sing. I was leaning against the gnarled trunk of a great beech, between two buttressed roots. Overhead was a green mist of unfolding leaves, and the silver and gray light slowly faded between the bare white boles of the wood. A few creaking grackles rowed through the sky, and in the distance crows cawed on their way to some secret roost. Down through the air fell the alto sky-call of the bluebirds, and robins flocking for the night whispered greetings to each other. Below me the brook was full of voices. It tinkled and gurgled, and around the bend at intervals sounded a murmur so human that at first I thought some other wanderer had discovered my refuge. It was only, however, the mysterious babble that always sounds at intervals when a brook sings to a human. It was as if the water were trying to speak the listener's language, and had learned the tones but not the words. Now and again the wind sounded in the valley below; then passed overhead with a vast hollow roar, so high that the spice-bush thicket which hid me hardly swayed.

I leaned back against the vast thews and ridged muscles of the beech, one of the generations upon generations of men who pass like dreams under its vast branches. One of my play-time fancies in the woods is to hark back a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years, and try to picture what trees and animals and men I might have met there then. Another is to choose the tree on which my life-years are to depend. Give up the human probabilities of life, and live as long or as short as the tree of my choice. Of course it would be a lottery. The tree might die, or be cut down, the year after I had made my bargain; and I used to plan how I would secure and guard the bit of woodland where my life-tree lived. Of all those that I met, this particular beech with the centuries behind it and the centuries yet to come, was my special choice, for the beech is the slowest growing of all our trees. This one towered high overhead, while its roots plunged down deep into the living waters and its vast girth seemed as if nothing could shake it.

That evening, as I lay against it and bargained for a share of its years, I thought that I felt the vast trunk move as if its life reached out to mine. Life is given to the tree and to the mammal. Why may they not meet on some common plane? Some one, some day, will learn the secret of that meeting-place.

So I dreamed, when suddenly in the twilight beyond my thicket a song began. It started with a series of cool, clear, round notes, like those of the wood thrush but with a wilder timbre. In the world where that singer dwells, there is no fret and fever of life and strife of tongues. On and on the song flowed, cool and clear. Then the strain changed. Up and up with glorious sweeps the golden voice soared. It was as if the wood itself were speaking. There was in it youth and hope and spring and glories of dawns and sunsets and moonlight and the sound of the wind from far away. Again the world was young and unfallen, nor had the gates of Heaven closed. All the long-lost dreams of youth came true--while the hermit thrush sang.

MCGRATH-SHERRILL PRESS GRAPHIC ARTS BLDG. BOSTON

Transcriber's note:

Archaic and inconsistent spelling and punctuation retained.