nes nor the last thirty lines. But we
may watch him write; we may observe how longingly he looks at the
telephone, as if tempted to go to it, and tell it what is in his
breast. There it sits, all shiny and metallic; and by conjuring it
with a number and a word, he could have her with him. Yet he does not
take it up; because--the crazy loon thinks in the soul of him, that
what he writes, some way, in the great unknown system of receivers and
recorders and transmitters of thought that range through this
universe, is pouring into her heart, and so he writes and smiles, and
smiles and writes--no bigger fool than half the other lovers on the
planet who, talking to their sweethearts, holding their hands and
looking squarely into their eyes, deceive themselves that what they
say is going to the heart, and not going in one ear and out of the
other.

And now let us put on our seven-league boots and walk from September's
green and brown, through October's gold and crimson, into that season
of the year 1906 when Nature is shifting her scenery, making ready for
the great spring show. It is bleak, but not cold; barren, but not
ugly,--for the stage setting of the hills and woods and streams, even
without the coloured wings and flies and the painted trees and grass,
has its fine simplicity of form and grouping that are good to look
upon. Observe in the picture a small man sitting on a log in a wood,
looking at the stencil work of the brown and gray branches, as its
shadows waver and shimmer upon the gray earth. He is poking
reflectively in the earth with his cane. His boat is tied to some tree
roots, and he doesn't breathe as regularly as a man should breathe who
is merely thinking of his next dinner or his last dollar. He delves
into himself and almost forgets to breathe at all, so deep is his
abstraction. And so he sits for five minutes--ten minutes--half an
hour--and save that he edges into the sun as the shadow of the great
walnut tree above catches him, an hour passes and he does not move.
Poking, poking, poking his stick into the mould, he has dug up much
litter in an hour, and he has seen his whole life thrown up before
him. In those leaves yonder is a battle--a bloody battle, and things
are blistered into his boyish heart in that battle that never heal
over; that tuft of sod is a girl's face--a little girl's face that he
loved as a boy; there is his first lawsuit--that ragged pile of
leaves by the twig at the log's end; and t