always remember it just as we see it now,
and it will be like this for ever for us."

"I'm going to sketch it," said Uncle Blair.

While he sketched it the Story Girl and I sat on the banks of the brook
and she told me the story of the Sighing Reed. It was a very simple
little story, that of the slender brown reed which grew by the forest
pool and always was sad and sighing because it could not utter music
like the brook and the birds and the winds. All the bright, beautiful
things around it mocked it and laughed at it for its folly. Who would
ever look for music in it, a plain, brown, unbeautiful thing? But one
day a youth came through the wood; he was as beautiful as the spring; he
cut the brown reed and fashioned it according to his liking; and then he
put it to his lips and breathed on it; and, oh, the music that floated
through the forest! It was so entrancing that everything--brooks and
birds and winds--grew silent to listen to it. Never had anything so
lovely been heard; it was the music that had for so long been shut up in
the soul of the sighing reed and was set free at last through its pain
and suffering.

I had heard the Story Girl tell many a more dramatic tale; but that one
stands out for me in memory above them all, partly, perhaps, because of
the spot in which she told it, partly because it was the last one I was
to hear her tell for many years--the last one she was ever to tell me on
the golden road.

When Uncle Blair had finished his sketch the shafts of sunshine were
turning crimson and growing more and more remote; the early autumn
twilight was falling over the woods. We left our dell, saying good-bye
to it for ever, as the Story Girl had suggested, and we went slowly
homeward through the fir woods, where a haunting, indescribable odour
stole out to meet us.

"There is magic in the scent of dying fir," Uncle Blair was saying aloud
to himself, as if forgetting he was not quite alone. "It gets into
our blood like some rare, subtly-compounded wine, and thrills us with
unutterable sweetnesses, as of recollections from some other fairer
life, lived in some happier star. Compared to it, all other scents seem
heavy and earth-born, luring to the valleys instead of the heights. But
the tang of the fir summons onward and upward to some 'far-off, divine
event'--some spiritual peak of attainment whence we shall see with
unfaltering, unclouded vision the spires of some aerial City Beautiful,
or the fulfilmen