prime and are showing gray
with age and ripening pappus, but here and there you find belated
specimens that hold color and honey still, and on these he paused
to breakfast. Then, as his wings rested for a moment, I could see
that his pure white was touched with tiny chain patterns of black
spots and I knew him for Cingalia catenaria, the chain-streak
moth. Somehow I am half-sorry to have found him out. I am not sure
but I would rather have remembered him as one of the mystical
fancies of the early dawn, some pure white dream materialized out
of the tenuous mists by the incantations of the Druid pines.
Neighborly and simple as are all the pasture people when we sit
quiet long enough to see them and gain their confidence by making
them feel that we are an integral portion of the place, as they
are, they all have something of the mystical about them. There are
four chipmunks, sleek and beautiful striped children of a this
year's late litter. These frolic about on the stones and among the
bushes at my very feet. They eat crusts almost from my hand. Yet
they might as well be mahatmas, for in their going and coming they
are as mysterious. I hear a scratching on a stone, and there sits
a chipmunk. With a swish he is gone, and unless I hear the
skittering of tiny feet a rod away I may not tell in what
direction or how. Then, too, the skittering may be that of some
entirely different creature. I prefer to think of them thus, as
furry bogles that bob up out of fairy tales and bob back again to
the making of a mythology that sniffs of sweet fern and bayberry
and has the flavor of barberry sauce.

The tender glow of still October days seems to fill the pasture
with such mysteries as this. Commonplace things are touched with
the softening haze of romance, and in the crystal stillness, the
happy aloofness of the place, the consciousness goes groping for
the unseen. It may be that by digging and grubbing I might unearth
the veritable home of my chipmunks, trace their cunning runways
under stone and through fog and brush and prove that there is
nothing of the theosophist about them. But not for worlds would I
do it, nor would I believe it if I found them. Therein lies the
inscrutability of faith.

*****

In the golden morning glow the sounds of the far and near world
seem to come without interference from intervening space and the
roar of the steam whistle on the liner at sea, eighteen miles away
over rough hilltops, is as intim