1 72 mature Studies in 3Berfcsbire. 



along its whole course. It is the analogue of life. 

 It is human experience foreshadowed in lower nat- 

 ure. And under a spreading tree we talked of the 

 deep things of life, and opened Emerson's poems, 

 and took fresh inspiration from his pages, fraught 

 with a sense of the divine in nature deeper even 

 than Wordsworth's. An hour later we again moved 

 on, this time making a stage of at least forty feet, 

 when we found a sunlit pool where we laved our 

 feet, while the minnows played about them, nibbling 

 furtively at our toes, and the big turtle, whose hole 

 was under an adjacent boulder, came out at inter- 

 vals to get his breath and to scowl his fear and 

 disapproval on us, -trespassers that we were, and 

 poachers in his front yard. 



A week later, travelling this same road, we passed 

 still farther up the brook, to where it winds like the 

 classic Meander through sunny meadows, where 

 the alders and the willows grow, and where the 

 cattle love to come and stand, midleg deep, in its 

 stream. And later still, the photographer of our 

 party tramped to the brook's source, up on the hills, 

 and brought away a picture of its headwaters. But 

 sweetest of all our memories will be that bright 

 morning when we wandered to the brookside, with 

 a little child for company, and lay stretched on a 

 greensward shaded by the meeting boughs of a 

 maple and a butternut, while she played like a baby 

 naiad in the stream, and the brook sang, and the 

 trees whispered, and the birds hopped on branches 



