158 SPRING JOTTINGS 



himself at the point of the pen. It was not till 

 after I got home that I really went to Maine, 

 or to the Adirondacks, or to Canada. Out of 

 the chaotic and nebulous impressions which 

 these expeditions gave me, I evolved the real 

 experience. There is hardly anything that 

 does not become much more in the telling than 

 in the thinking, or in the feeling. 



I see the fishermen floating up and down the 

 river above their nets, which are suspended far 

 out of sight in the water beneath them. They 

 do not know what fish they have got, if any, 

 till after a Avhile they lift the nets up and ex- 

 amine them. In all of us there is a region of 

 sub-consciousness above which our ostensible 

 lives go forward, and in which much comes to 

 us or is slowly developed, of which we are quite 

 ignorant, until we lift up our nets and inspect 

 them. 



Then the charm and significance of a day are 

 so subtle and fleeting! Before we know it, it 

 is gone past all recovery. I find that each 

 spring, that each summer, and fall, and winter 

 of my life has a hue and quality of its own, 

 given by some prevailing mood, a train of 

 thought, an event, an experience, — a color or 

 quality of which I am quite unconscious at the 

 time, being too near to it, and too completely 

 enveloped by it. But afterward, some mood or 

 circumstance, an odor, or fragment of a tune 

 brings it back as by a flash ; for one brief sec- 

 ond the adamantine door of the past swings 

 open and gives me a glimpse of my former life. 



