eading, out into
the highway, on into the winding lane, on into the wood-road, on and
on, until one comes to that mysterious and delightful ending, (told of
in the familiar saying,) where the road finally dwindles into a
squirrel track and runs up a tree--not an ending at all, you see, but
really a beginning! For there is the tree; and if you climb it, who
knows what new landscape, what lively adventure, will open before you?
At any rate, you will get away from the tyranny of the commonplace, the
conventional, the methodical, which transforms the rhythm of life into
a logarithm. Even a small variation, a taste of surprise, will give you
what you need as a spring tonic: the sense of escape, a day off.

Living in a university town, and participating with fidelity in its
principal industry, I find that my own particular nightmare of monotony
takes the form of examination papers--quires of them, reams of them,
stacks of them--a horrid incubus, always oppressive, but then most
unendurable when the book-room begins to smell musty in the morning,
and the fire is unlit upon the hearth, and last night's student-lamp is
stuccoed all over with tiny gnats, and the breath of the blossoming
grape is wafted in at the open window, and the robins, those melodious
rowdies, are whistling and piping over the lawn and through the trees
in voluble mockery of the professor's task. "Come out," they say, "come
out! Why do you look in a book? Double, double, toil and trouble! Give
it up--tup, tup, tup! Come away and play for a day. What do you know?
Let it go. You're as dry as a chip, chip, chip! Come out, won't you?
will you?"

Truly, these examination questions that I framed with such pains look
very dull and tedious now--a desiccation of the beautiful work of the
great poets. And these answers that the boys have wrought out with such
pains, on innumerable pads of sleazy white paper, how little they tell
me of what the fellows really know and feel! Examination papers are
"requisite and necessary," of course; I can't deny it--requisite
formalities and necessary absurdities. But to turn the last page of the
last pad, and mark it with a red pencil and add it to the pile of
miseries past, and slip away from books to nature, from learning to
life, between the lupin and the laurel--that is a pleasure doubled by
release from pain.

I think a prize should be offered for the discovery of good places to
take a free and natural outing within easy reac