WOODLAND PATHS 



day habitations, in a scrub forest that 

 was fifty years ago a stretch of cathedral 

 pines. Only long search showed me the 

 faint hollow in the brown earth which was 

 once the narrow cellar of a wee house. 

 No record of an early householder here re- 

 mains other than that planted by the hope- 

 ful housewife's hand, the lilac shrub. 



For more than a century it has held 

 the ground where its fellow-pioneers 

 planted it, holding close within its pinky 

 heart-wood memories of English lanes 

 white with hawthorne and, far beyond 

 these, indistinct recollections of rose- 

 perfumed Persian gardens, the home of 

 its race. Perhaps upon its ancestral root 

 rested the feet of Omar Khayyam when 

 he wrote: 



And when like her, O Saki, you shall pass 

 Among the guests star-scattered on the grass, 

 And in your blissful errand reach the spot 

 Where I made one turn down an empty glass. 

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