12 IN BIRD LAND. 
immaculateness of the sky, or the purity of a wood- 
land flower, rebukes one, gives one a keen sense of 
one’s sins, and makes one long for absolution; or 
when the pensive moaning of the wind through the 
gray, branchless trees on a winter’s day forces on 
the mind a prevision of a judgment about to be 
visited upon one’s misdoings. Yet this is seldom 
my own experience while idling in out-of-the-way 
places. Usually I feel soothed and comforted, or, 
at most, a sort of glad melancholy steals over me, 
which is as enchanting as a magician’s spell; while 
I often win exhilaration from the whispering breezes, 
as if they carried a tonic on their pulsing wings. 
On the spring morning on which my friend so 
studiously avoided Nature’s by-paths, my stint of 
labor for the day was soon despatched, and then, 
flinging my lunch-bag over my shoulders, I hurried 
across the fields, anxious to put a comfortable dis- 
tance between myself and bothering human tene- 
ments. By noon I had reached a green hollow at 
the border of a woodland, where Nature, to a large 
extent at least, has had her own sweet way. Here, 
on the grassy bank of a rivulet, I sat down to eat my 
luncheon. ‘The spring near by filled my cup with 
ale that sparkles, but never burns; that quenches 
thirst, but never creates it. Not a human habita- 
tion was in sight; nothing but the tinkling brook, 
the sloping hills, the quiet woods, and the overarch- 
ing sky. The haunt was not without music. The 
far-away cadences of the bush-sparrows on the hill- 
side filled the place like melodious sunshine. A 
