lophone for a dance
unseen by my gross mortal eyes, but if my water-logged ear did not
deceive me--and I hope it did--it was only the beat of the big
drops of rain on the twigs above, clarified and made resonant by
its passage through the vibrant wood to my ear. At any rate, it
was a most delightful musical entertainment of which I fancy
myself the discoverer, and I hope it was the dryad. He who reads
may believe as he will.

Beyond the pines I found the wind in the woods. Among the bare
limbs of the deciduous growth the storm wailed and clattered its
way on about my head as I felt out the path with my feet for a
half mile to a pine-crowned hilltop. Again I was in sanctuary. The
hilltop carried us up--the pines and me--into the full sweep
of the gale, yet under their spreading, beneficent arms I felt no
breath of wind. Overhead I noted its own wild voice as, very near
and right with it in chorus, the pines sang, swaying in time to
their music as I have seen a rapt singer do. Strangely enough, in
their tones up here I could hear no cry of the sea. They sang
instead the tumult of the sky, the vast loneliness of distant
spaces, something of the deep-toned threnody of the ancient
universe, mourning for worlds now dark.

Something of this the gale drew from the pines as it crowded by,
but never once did its fiercest gusts disturb the serenity of the
sanctuary beneath. A foot or two down from their topmost boughs
was shelter for the crows, snugged down on a lee limb, close to
the trunk, their feathers set to shed such rain as might strike
them, their long black beaks thrust beneath their wings, rocked in
the cradle of the deep woods, sung to sleep by their lullaby of
the primal universe. There was little need to waste sympathy on
them or on any other little folk of the forest who had for their
shelter the brooding arms of these beneficent trees stretched
above them.

Pines are the great, deep-breasted mothers of the woods, giving
food and shelter from sun and storm to all who will come to them.
Prolific mothers they are, too, and if man with his axe and his
fire would but spare them they would in a generation or two
reclothe our Massachusetts waste lands with their kind once more.
Recklessly as the generations have destroyed them, sweeping often
great tracts bare of every noble trunk, leaving the slash piled
high for the fire to complete the destruction of the axe, they
still persist, pushing the greenwood with its fluf