glades, was as beautiful as though Art had planned and Time
had perfected the work. Time's touch was there, but Art had had nothing
to do with it. Each tree had risen from the ground where it and Nature
pleased; birds, perhaps, with dropped seeds, had been the first planters
of the lower growths. Yet it was not primeval; Winthrop, well used to
primeval things, and liking them (to gratify the liking he had made more
than one journey to the remoter parts of the great West), detected this
at once. Open and free as the Levels were, he could yet see, as he
walked onward, the signs of a former cultivation antecedent to all this
soft, wild leisure. His eye could trace, by their line of fresher green,
the course of the old drains crossing regularly from east to west; the
large trees were sometimes growing from furrows which had been made by
the plough before their first tiny twin leaves had sprouted from the
acorn which had fallen there. "How stationary things are here!" he said,
half admiringly. He was thinking of the ceaseless round of change and
improvement which went on, year after year, on the northern farms he
knew, of the thrift which turned every inch of the land to account, and
made it do each season its full share. The thrift, the constant change
and improvement, were best, of course; Winthrop was a warm believer in
the splendid industries of the great republic to which he belonged;
personally, too, there was nothing of the idler in his temperament.
Still, looked at in another way, the American creed for the moment
dormant, there was something delightfully restful in the indolence of
these old fields, lying asleep in the sunshine with the low furrows of a
hundred years before stretching undisturbed across them. Here was no
dread, no eager speed before the winter. It was, in truth, the absence
of that icy task-master which gave to all the lovely land its appearance
of dreaming leisure. Growing could begin at any time; why, then, make
haste?

"All this ground was once under cultivation," said the Doctor. "The
first Edgar Thorne (your great-grandfather, Garda) I conjecture to have
been a man of energy, who improved the methods of the Dueros; these
Levels probably had a very different aspect a hundred years ago."

"A hundred years ago--yes, that was the time to have lived," said Garda.
"I wish I could have lived a hundred years ago!"

"I don't know what we can do," said Winthrop. "Perhaps Dr. Kirby would
undertake for