eyes to the stars. The very sunbeams fall on the body as a warm
golden net, and keep thought and feeling from escape. Nature uses
beauty now not to uplift, but to entice. I find her intent upon
the one general business of seeing that no type of her creatures
gets left out of the generations. Studied in my yard full of birds,
as with a condensing-glass of the world, she can be seen enacting
among them the dramas of history. Yesterday, in the secret recess
of a walnut, I saw the beginning of the Trojan war. Last week
I witnessed the battle of Actium fought out in mid-air. And down
among my hedges--indeed, openly in my very barn-yard--there is a
perfectly scandalous Salt Lake City.

And while I am watching the birds, they are watching me. Not a little
fop among them, having proposed and been accepted, but perches on
a limb, and has the air of putting his hands mannishly under his
coattails and crying out at me, "Hello! Adam, what were you made
for?" "You attend to your business, and I'll attend to mine," I
answer. "You have one May; I have twenty-five!" He didn't wait
to hear. He caught sight of a pair of clear brown eyes peeping
at him out of a near tuft of leaves, and sprang thither with open
arms and the sound of a kiss.

But if I have twenty-five Mays remaining, are not some Mays gone?
Ah, well! Better a single May with the right mate than the full
number with the wrong. And where is she--the right one? If she
ever comes near my yard and answers my whistle, I'll know it; and
then I'll teach these popinjays in blue coats and white pantaloons
what Adam was made for.

But the wrong one--there's the terror! Only think of so composite
a phenomenon as Mrs. Walters, for instance, adorned with limp
nightcap and stiff curl-papers, like garnishes around a leg of
roast mutton, waking up beside me at four o'clock in the morning
as some gray-headed love-bird of Madagascar, and beginning to chirp
and trill in an ecstasy!

The new neighbors have come--mother, younger daughter, and servants.
The son is at West Point; and the other daughter lingers a few days,
unable, no doubt, to tear herself away from her beloved pennyroyal
and dearest Green River. They are quiet; have borrowed nothing
from any one in the neighborhood; have well-dressed, well-trained
servants; and one begins to be a little impressed. The curtains
they have put up at the windows suggest that the whole nest is being
lined with soft, cool spotle