156 RIVERBY 



one's thoughts and days. To a countryman, espe- 

 cially of a meditative turn, who likes to preserve the 

 flavor of the passing moment, or to a person of lei- 

 sure anywhere, who wants to make the most of life, 

 a journal will be found a great help. It is a sort 

 of deposit account wherein one saves up bits and 

 fragments of his life that would otherwise be lost to 

 him. 



What seemed so insignificant in the passing, or as 

 it lay in embryo in his mind, becomes a valuable 

 part of his experiences when it is fully unfolded and 

 recorded in black and white. The process of writ- 

 ing develops it ; the bud becomes the leaf or flower ; 

 the one is disentangled from the many and takes 

 definite form and hue. I remember that Thoreau 

 says in a letter to a friend, after his return from a 

 climb to the top of Monadnock, that it is not till he 

 gets home that he really goes over the mountain; 

 that is, I suppose, sees what the climb meant to him 

 when he comes to write an account of it to his friend. 

 Every one's experience is probably much the same; 

 when we try to tell what we saw and felt, even to 

 our journals, we discover more and deeper meanings 

 in things than we had suspected. 



The pleasure and value of every walk or journey 

 we take may be doubled to us by carefully noting 

 down the impressions it makes upon us. How much 

 of the flavor of Maine birch I should have missed 

 had I not compelled that vague, unconscious being 

 within me, who absorbs so much and says so little, 

 to unbosom himself at the point of the pen ! It was 



