ON A PORCH 



woods, I find that very little of it remains but 

 the equable and uneventful light of it. If 1 try 

 to recall what was disagreeable or annoying, I 

 have to refer to notes made at the time, and 

 those notes are for the most part meaningless 

 now and strangely superfluous, bearing the impli 

 cation that the annoyances of life are not to be 

 preserved, and inferentially that the forces that 

 make up real life preserve themselves without 

 our special wonder. How trite the dear old 

 trees were, how platitudinous and self-possessed. 

 How unoriginal and reiterative were the seasons, 

 doing just the same things over and over from 

 the beginning. How undemonstrative, regular, 

 and plodding the sunshine was, how incapable of 

 a new departure. In our callow days we placed 

 a Grecian Aurora in our sunrise. She always 

 wore a saffron robe and came out of a golden pal 

 ace with a torch in her hand. But how purely 

 infantile that conception is to the ordinary sage 

 like myself, who has been introduced to her and 

 enjoyed her homely hospitality. Instead of 

 being a frisky nymph, calling attention to her 

 flights, like a ballerina or a Bernhardt, she is an 

 old woman, attending to her regular routine with 

 precise decorum. If you accept that similitude 

 for a moment, it will grow clearer to you as you 

 remember. It was the old woman s benign regu 

 larity that we never thought of at the time, but 

 that was an awful deprivation when it was gone. 

 What did we know about her unseen traction 

 that kept us planets and comets in our courses, 



121 



