THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL 



is it ?&quot; he said. &quot; It s spring, Comrade,&quot; I replied. 

 And then we had a little war-dance in which the 

 yellow dog joined. 



I never heard those tiny birth-pangs of the 

 season afterward, without a little quickening of 

 the pulse. Once you get on intimate terms with 

 this Not Me, who strums her zithers and thun 

 ders her open diapasons, she will have many 

 pleasant surprises for you. You will discover, 

 by degrees, that she is a blood relation. She 

 recognizes the same Father and knew him before 

 you did. After that you, shake hands with the 

 trees and salute the winds familiarly as they pass. 

 Then you learn, possibly, that Nature is not 

 aesthetic. She struggles just as hard as any artist 

 after an unseen prototype, but it is because she 

 is under orders. She is as austere as a Puritan, 

 in her duty, and never by any possibility bothers 

 with sentimentalism. We always bring that non 

 sense to her in our kits and our albums. She 

 stands up to her work with a rigid invincibility 

 that makes an aesthete shiver, and offers up her off 

 spring as unquestioningly as did Abraham, and so 

 well drilled are all her countless myriads that 

 there is not a blade of grass hidden from the eye 

 that does not strive as hard as it can to live and 

 die for something other than itself. 



So it was, that in the smoky confines of our 

 far-away hut, swept by bleak storms or shone on 

 by yellow sunshine, Charlie and I sat through 

 the seasons, humbly, like the squirrels that we 

 often heard under our floor, playing at bowls with 



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