62 LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



sand prisms of scintillant light. The dancing 

 night winds had shaken all the rich odors from the 

 white clethra blooms that grow all about the 

 pond's rim and stored them along its surface, and 

 to swim out toward the center was to enter a 

 sweetly perfumed bath. The forest to eastward, 

 full of black density, as it was, could not bar out 

 the rose of the morning from the sight. Instead 

 it stood in a silhouetted fretting against it and let 

 its glow shine through a million tiny windows of 

 the day, blossoming again in the ripples ahead. 

 Here was a moving picture of the blooming and 

 vanishing of pink meadow-flowers, flashing a 

 brief life upon the film, vanishing and growing 

 again. The cinematograph is nothing new. 

 Walden has operated it for those who will swim 

 toward the dawn in its waters since the centuries 

 began. In our theaters we are but tawdry imi- 

 tators of its film productions. 



Chin deep in its middle you begin to feel that 

 you know the pond. In a sense you are its eye and 

 look upon the world as it does. Day breaks for 

 the swimmer as it does for Walden, and the flash 

 of the sun above the wood to eastward warms 



