Music of the Wild 



I never saw "father" and "mother." They 



were gone before the willows called me. Her son 



"Father" tol(l me that "mother had big brown eyes and 



^"'^ white hair, and her cheeks were always a little 



"Mother" t -i i ' • 



pink. Of course they ^YeYe. Like the cmnamon 

 pinks of her garden. So by the lilies and the rag- 

 ged robins and her porch, facing frotn the dust 

 and turmoil of travel, we know "mother." And 

 by the schoolhouse he built with his hands, by the 

 cultivation of beauty and music all around his 

 home and entire farm, by the neatness of his barns 

 and outbuildings, by the trees he s])ared and the 

 trees he planted, we know "father." By these 

 things ^Ye know where "father" is to-day. So when 

 the last book is Avritten and the last picture made, 

 if I have done mj" work nearly so well as "father" 

 did his, j^erhaps we will have a happy meeting. 



I should love to tell him that his ^vork lives as 

 an exam])le to his neighbors; how his willows have 

 grown, and that they called me from afar, and I 

 put them into a book for thousands to see, that 

 they might learn of his great-hearted humanity. 

 I shall want to tell him how many hoiu-s I have 

 lain on the grass under the big pear tree at the 

 corner of his house, of all the lunches I have eaten 

 on the front porch looking into the orchard, of 

 the cotton-tails that yet scampered there unafraid, 

 and how one season a little red-eyed vireo built 

 on a branch of the apple tree 



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