d storm swept this neighborhood. Later, deep in the
woods, I came upon an elm that had been struck by a bolt at the top.
Nearly half the trunk had been torn away; and one huge limb lay across
my path.

As I stood looking at it, the single note of a bird fell on my
ear--always the same note, low, quiet, regular, devoid of feeling, as
though the bird had been stunned and were trying to say: _What can I
do_? _What can I do_? _What can I do_?

I knew what that note meant. It was the note with which a bird now and
then lingers around the scene of the central tragedy of its life.

After a long search I found the nest, crushed against the ground under
the huge limb, and a few feet from it, in the act of trying to escape,
the female. The male, sitting meantime on the end of a bough near by,
watched me incuriously, and with no change in that quiet, regular,
careless note--he knew only too well that she was past my harming. The
plan for his life had reached an end in early summer.

I sat down near him for a while, thinking of the universal tragedy of
the nest.

It was the second time to-day that this divine wastage in nature had
forced itself on my thought, and this morning the spectacle was on a
scale of tragic greatness beyond anything that has ever touched human
life in this part of the country: Mr. Clay was buried amid the long sad
blare of music, the tolling of bells, the roll of drums, the boom of
cannon, and the grief of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
people--a vast and solemn pageant, yet as nothing to the multitude that
will attend afar. For him this day the flags of nations will fly at
half-mast; and the truly great men of the world, wherever the tidings
may reach them of his passing, will stand awe-stricken that one of
their superhuman company has been too soon withdrawn.

Too soon withdrawn! Therein is the tragedy of the nest, the wastage of
the divine, the law of loss, whose reign on earth is unending, but
whose right to reign no creature, brute or human, ever acknowledges.

The death of Mr. Clay is one of the many things that are happening to
change all that made up my life with Georgiana. She was a true
hero-worshipper, and she worshipped him. I no less. Now that he is
dead, I feel as much lonelier as a soldier feels whose chosen tent-mate
and whose general have fallen on the field together.

As I turned, away from the overcrowded town this afternoon towards the
woods and was confron