efly in getting berries, any more than
fishing consists chiefly in getting fish, or hunting in getting birds.
The essence of berrying is the state of mind that accompanies it. It is
a semi-contemplative recreation, providing physical quiet with just
enough motion to prevent restlessness--being, in this respect, like
"whittling." I said semi-contemplative, because, while it seems to
induce meditation, the beauty of it is that you don't really meditate at
all, you only think you are doing so, or are going to. That is what
makes it so recuperative in its effects. It just delicately shaves the
line between stimulating you to thought and boring you because it does
not stimulate. Thus it brings about in you a perfect state of poise most
restful in itself and in a complete harmony with the midsummer season.

Yes, fishing is good, and hunting is good, and all the sports are good
in their turn--even sitting in a rocking-chair on a boarding-house
piazza has, perhaps, its charms and its benefits for some;--but when the
sun is hot and the wind is cool, when the hay is in and the yellowing
fields lie broad, when the woods have gathered their birds and their
secrets to their very hearts, when the sky is deeply, warmly blue, and
the clouds pile soft or float thin and light, then give me a pail and
let me wander up, up, to the great open berry lots. I will let the sun
shine on me and the wind blow me, and I will love the whole big world,
and I will think not a single thought, and at sundown I will come home
with a full pail and a contentedly empty mind.

XI

In the Rain

It was raining. It had begun to rain the afternoon before; it had rained
all night, with the drizzling, sozzling kind of rain that indicated
persistence. It had rained all the morning; it was obviously going to
rain all day. The hollow beside the stone hitching-post, where the
grocer's horse and the butcher's horse and the fishman's horse had
stamped, all through the drought, was now a pool of brown water, with
the raindrops making gooseflesh on it. There was another pond under the
front gate, and another under the hammock; and the middle of the road,
in the horse rut, was a narrow brown brook. The tiger lilies in the old
stump were bending with their load of wetness, the phlox in the garden
was weighed down till its white masses nearly touched earth. Indoors,
when the wind lulled and the rain fell straighter, we could hear the
drops tick-tick-ticking on th