24 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 



a big moth whirs about my head and is gone ; a bat 

 flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, is blotted out 

 by the darkness, blazes again, and so passes, his tiny 

 lantern flashing into a night that seems the darker 

 for his quick, unsteady glow. 



We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my 

 other teachers I had been taught every manner of 

 stirring, and this strange exercise of being still takes 

 me where my body is weakest, and puts me almost 

 out of breath. 



What ! out of breath by keeping still ? Yes, be- 

 cause I had been hurrying hither and thither, do- 

 ing this and that doing them so fast for so many 

 years that I no longer understood how to sit down 

 and keep still and do nothing inside of me as well 

 as outside. Of course you know how to keep still, 

 for you are children. And so perhaps you do not need 

 to take lessons of teacher Toad. But I do, for I am 

 grown up, and a man, with a world of things to 

 do, a great many of which I do not need to do at 

 all if only I would let the toad teach me all he 

 knows. 



So, when I am tired, I will go over to the toad. I 

 will sit at his feet, where time is nothing, and the 

 worry of work even less. He has all time and no 

 task. He sits out the hour silent, thinking I 

 know not what, nor need to know. So we will sit in 

 silence, the toad and I, watching Altair burn along 

 the shore of the horizon, and overhead Arcturus, and 



