BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 175 



fection, and the day also ; I had walked far 

 enough to make a seat welcome, yet not so 

 far as to bring on sluggish fatigue ; and 

 everything in sight was pure beauty. Life 

 will be sweet as long as it has such half- 

 hours to offer us. Yet somehow, human 

 nature having a perverse trick of letting 

 good suggest its opposite, I found myself, 

 all at once, 



" In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts 

 Bring sad thoughts to the mind." 



I looked at the garden patch and the 

 mowed field, and thought what a strange 

 world it is — ill-made, half -made, or unmade 



— in which man has to live, or, in our preg- 

 nant every-day phrase, to get his living ; a 

 world that goes whirling on its axis and re- 

 volving round its heat-and-light-giving body, 



— like a top which a boy has set spinning, 



— now roasted and parched, now drenched 

 and sodden, now frozen dead; a world 

 wherein, as our good American stoic com- 

 plained, a man must burn a candle half the 

 time in order to see to live ; a world to which 

 its inhabitants are so poorly adapted that 

 a day of comfortable temperature is matter 



