down the rapids betimes and flashes up as a spirit in prayer, or as 
touching the old rock out of compassion for its eternal quiet or out 
of sport and raillery, | know not which. 
I lie under a ragged cedar on the eastern bank. Its shadows and 
odors are a tent, and its leaning branches brush my face when the 
wind stirs, and its odors house me in their sacred balsam. The winds 
sing lazily through the trees and touch the quiet cedars into indolent 
motion, and the aspen near by dances its every leaf as with some 
apocalypse of joy; and the locust sends his strident call through the 
woods and across the stream; and a solitary killdee shrills his plaintive 
call as he races from pool to pool on the river’s brink; and the wren 
chatters in wren dialect, screened from inquisitive eyes, or the bluejay 
calls hoarsely, ‘(I am—I am here—here—here,”’ as if everybody was 
interested in that information, and the wind blows in my face with a 
breath as of early winter, refreshing as it comes from mountain streams; 
and | lie and read Lowell, and am pensive and yet glad. I am reading 
the search for the singing leaf, 
“And deep through the green-wood rode he 
And asked of every tree, 
O if you have ever a singing leaf 
I pray you give it me. 
And the trees all kept their counsel, 
And never a word said they 
Only, there sighed from the tree-tops 
A music of seas far away." 
And with such an afterncon in such a place the world draws off like 
a defeated army,—far off, where it seems not so much as be. The sun 
PINES, RAGGED AS SPANISH SOLDIERS 
114 
