ll flowering.

She hurried across the meadow, climbed the old rail fence, and plodded
her way over the plowed ground, stepping from ridge to ridge and feeling
the earth crumble under her feet at every step. It was a ten-acre field,
and she was out of breath by the time she reached the other side. There
was no fence between field and forest; the only boundary line was the
last furrow made by the plow. On one side of this furrow lay
civilization with its ordered life of cares and duties. On the other
side was the wild, free life of Nature. She stopped and looked
doubtfully into the sunlit aisles of the forest, as we look at old
familiar places, revisited after long absence, to see if they measure up
to the stately beauty with which our childish imagination clothed them.
She stepped timidly through the underbrush at the edge of the wood and
looked above and around. So many years had passed, and so many things
had passed with the years! Perhaps the remembered enchantment had passed
too. She recalled the song of the birds, and how the voice of the wind
in the tree-tops had sounded against the fathomless stillness that lies
at the heart of the forest. She held her breath and listened. Wind and
leaf and bird were making music together as of old; and under the
whisper and the song she felt the presence of the eternal, inviolable
calm against which earth's clamor vainly beats. She recalled the rustle
of the dead leaves under her feet, and the odor that the heat of the sun
drew from the moist earth. There were dead leaves to-day in every path,
and Nature was distilling the same perfumes and making beauty from ashes
by the same wondrous alchemy she had used when the earth was young.
Nothing had changed except herself. She looked around for an opening in
the underbrush, some trace of a path, and then hastened fearlessly on to
find the main path that led through the heart of the woods, and made a
"short cut" for the traveler on foot. Besides this central path, there
were numerous little by-paths made by the feet of cattle that had
pastured here for a few months of the previous summer. Each one of these
invited her feet, and each one led past some fairy spot--a bed of
flowers, a bower of wild vines, a grapevine swing, a tiny spring from
which she drank, using a big, mossy acorn cup for a goblet. She wandered
from one side of the main path to the other, and thrice she walked from
road to road. All winter she had been snow-bound and ice