eally got the syllables and wrote
them down I should, with study, be able to translate it all. It
ought not to be half so difficult as these hieroglyphic and
cuneiform inscriptions on stone and brick buried in Assyrian ruins
for ten thousand years, more or less, and now blithely put into
modern speech by the Egyptologists.

The brook writes for me, too. On every placid pool at the foot of
some race of ripples it mixes Morse-code dots and dashes with
stenographic curves, all written in white foam on the smooth black
mirror of the surface. Nor does it end there, so eager it is to
call its message to my notice. Through the quiver of sun and shade
it sends heliograph flashes to me on the bank, making again the
dots and dashes of the Morse-code alphabet, yet still with such
lightning-like rapidity that my dull eye fails to read. Only the
foam writing gives brief opportunity for one to study the
characters and decide what they mean: Sometimes there it is not
difficult to find words in the Morse-code and phrases in the
stenographic curves though I have no more than a word or a brief
phrase before the current rearranges the puzzle and I must begin
all over again. I doubt not many brookside idlers have done as
much as that. I fancy many a summer couple, say a brave telegraph
clerk and a fair stenographer, have worked out as much as "I love
you" and "God bless our home" long before this.

After all, the brook is shallow and it is probable that it
prattles merely the gossip of today and yesterday and the days
gone by. Yet even so it might give me the story of this mill that
so long ago stood upon its bank, something of the talk of the
miller and his customer and the events of their time, matter I can
get from no printed book nor from the tongue of man now living.
Could I but get this I should have a rare book indeed, for nothing
is so vivid to the reader as the true story of the plain life, the
words and deeds of folk who lived a hundred or more years ago. The
plain tales of Boswell, Pepys, Samuel Sewall, will live when all
the series of six best sellers that have ever been are drifting
dust.

The brook tells me more of nature than it does of man, perhaps
because it has known man for so short a time, though I should say
shows rather than tells. A hundred forms of life live in it and on
it, while through the air above float a thousand more, or the
evidences of them. Downstream come the scents of the flowers in
bloom above. Ju