ening prayer of the woodland world. As his angelus rings out
I fancy all wild heads bowed in adoration. Certainly the wood
thrush's call touches that chord in the human breast. To listen to
it with open heart is to know all things are for good and that a
peace from mystic spaces far above the woodland is descending upon
it. Heard through this song the tone of the brook's voice changes
and instead of swift-syllabled gossip I seem to hear it softly
crooning a hymn.

CHAPTER XV

GHOSTS OF THE NORTHEASTER

"The Fourth of July is past; the summer is gone," says a New
England proverb. In this as in many a quaint saying of our
weather-wise, hill-tramping ancestors, there is more than a half-truth
hidden in what seems a humorous distortion. In mid-August we
look about us and know this, for we see ourselves slipping more
and more rapidly down the long slope that leads from flower-crowned
hilltop to frozen lake. Some day a snowstorm will get under
the runners and the balance of the descent will be but a
single shish. Meanwhile we may note the passage by certain
landmarks. In the seven weeks that come between the longest day
and the fifteenth of August, thunderstorms may bring local relief
to the parched earth, but otherwise it is our dry season, and by
the first week in August the farmers are holding their hands to
heaven in vain prayers for rain, vowing that never was so dry a
time and that if the seasons thus continue to change Massachusetts
will be a desert.

Always during August Jupiter Pluvius is wont to change all this.
He sends us not showers, but a rain that wets us for a day and a
night and perhaps longer, and, however greedily the parched earth
may suck it up, finally irrigates all the waste places and covers
all the sore earth with a soothing, healing salve of mud. Such
rains come in to us riding on the broad back of the east wind, as
rode the prince in Andersen's fairy tale, and as the big drops
fall upon us we catch intoxicating scents borne to us from far
Cathay. On the east wind's back the prince rode into paradise
itself, which still lies hidden beneath hills to the eastward of
the Himalayas. We should not blame him for kissing the fairy
princess and being banished, for if he had not done so he had not
brought back the tale and we should not know whence came the
soothing odors that drip with the rain from the wings of the east
wind. Fragrance of spice and of flowers, bloom of ripe fruit, of
grape a