A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



tured to remark, &quot; when he, like you, has pre 

 served so much of it.&quot; 



&quot; But I have to try to preserve it, my dear fel 

 low. That s the rub. If I had known as much 

 at your age as I know now, I would have let it 

 preserve itself.&quot; 



&quot; Oh, it has, Doctor. It has ; believe me.&quot; 



It was still October, and six o clock in the 

 morning. We were miles from nowhere, stand 

 ing side by side in a fall exhibition, where every 

 picture was on the line, and all the artists had 

 gone away. 



I suppose it is the crowning futility of senti- 

 mentalism to try and remember all the sunrises 

 and sunsets of one s heydays. It only adds to 

 one s late pathos in life to open his old album and 

 smile wearily at the souvenirs that have grown 

 meaningless. How many pages with a crisp rem 

 nant of perished stalk or leaf, and under it the 

 attempt to fasten the fleeting emotion in words 

 &quot;A happy day at ,&quot; or &quot;A little souvenir of 

 unalloyed brightness.&quot; How clumsily we try to 

 climb back on these faded memorials to suggested 

 heights, and how invariably we give it up with the 

 appalling conviction that the emotion, whatever it 

 was, belonged only to that hour, like the flower. 

 But here and there some sunrises burn themselves 

 into the page of our experience without our aid, 

 and they stay like the golden shield that some one 

 hangs upon our wall, catching the same old light 

 even when our eyes have grown dim. 



I can see now that those sunrises were only half 

 204 



