SPRING JOTTINGS 157 



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 ex- 

 peditions 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 

 while they lift the nets up and examine 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 uncon- 

 scious at the time, being too near to it, and too com- 

 pletely 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 second 

 the adamantine door of the past swings open and 

 gives me a glimpse of my former life. One's jour- 

 nal, dashed off without any secondary motive, may 



