662 ANNUAL. REPORT OF TITB Off. Doc. 



plicity of the wondrous process by which she brings to perfection 

 the wonderful picture of a June landscape. Without a sound or 

 confusion, with no show of heraldry or pomp, the dormant forces 

 of Life, at the first faint whispering of the April breezes, coaxed by 

 the sun and the shower, quicken into being and tremulously break- 

 ing the sheltering sod, peep from their hiding places upon the won- 

 derland Dame Nature has called them to view. Silently the violets 

 bud, quietly the apple blossom bursts its sheath, with never a mur- 

 mur the w^heat, the corn, the clover push upward and show their 

 brilliant colors, and the human soul, living among the unseen forces, 

 of the Infinite as quietly and surely takes on the form God meant 

 it to have. Here are budded great thoughts and ambitions. Oui- 

 greatest men have been bred under God's open sky, surrounded by 

 the fleecy clouds, the green of the foliage and the light of the sun- 

 kissed meadows. 



In the opening of the summer time, the great heyday of the earth, 

 where there is joy and contentment, where untrammeled, over- 

 whelming joy of existence, but near to Nature's heart, free from the 

 mercenary surroundings of the world, away from the perplexing 

 questions of life, out in God's own country among the birds and bees 

 and sweet smelling clover, 



"What is so rare as a day in June? 

 That, if ever, comes perfect days; 

 Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, 

 And over it softly her warm ear lays; 

 Whether we look, or whether we listen. 

 We hear life murmer, or see it glisten; 

 Every clod feels a stir of might, 



An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 

 And groping blindly above it for light, 

 Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers." 

 "The heart forgets its sorrow and ache. 

 And the eyes forget the tears they have shed; 

 'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true. 

 As for grass to be green or skies to be blue." 



And when the melancholy days are come, the days of the falling 

 leaf and the meadow brown and sere, when all the sheaves are gar- 

 nered and the barn is bursting with its wealth of ripened grain, when 

 the dreamy afternoon of nature is upon us, she tunes our hearts to 

 deeper melodies and, as the brilliant tints about us are but precur- 

 sors of the angel of death, she quietly teaches us the old, old lesson: 

 "We all do fade as a leaf. In the morning we are like grass which 

 groweth up; in the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the 

 evening it is cut down and withereth." 



Yet, though the dash of blue against the sky is with the blue-bird 

 fled, though the mocking-bird is silenced and the daisy no more greets 

 the sun, we have the promise that '^^while the earth remaineth, seed- 

 time and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day 

 and night shall not cease," and with the hope of another springtim'i 

 the farmer may prepare himself snugly for the winter with the con- 

 sciousness, that come what may, by his industrious toil he and his 

 are sheltered from the inclemencies of the weather. In the quiet 

 stillness of the broad expanse of the snow-drift, surrounded by the 

 denuded trees and the frozen rivulets, in the clear, cold, bracing 

 atmosphere of the typical winter day, what one could v.ish to be 

 housed up between brick walls where a glimpse of the sun is a lux- 

 ury and the pure whiteness of the snow is unknown? Who would 



