like a man trom Kansas, and slapping me on the shoulder like a man 
from Nevada! In the mountains (was it yesterday or this forenoon?) 
what boyish delight I have taken in going uphill in August with a 
water-brook, till, with spent strength, but with wild, hilarious spirits, | 
have laid me down on my stomach to drink waters just squeezed from 
the snow drift. Who would drink wine after such elixir? How could 
he? And the laughter of the water—God tuned its singing as he did the 
singing of the winds; and there is no complaint of flatting or sharping, 
no defective tones, only music, music, music! 
| have followed streams on mountains and on prairie and through 
thickets of Minnesota and through Wisconsin pines, and through the 
dreary foot-hills, and through lonely sage-grown desert, and through the 
high meadows of Colorado, standing above the summits of Tennessee 
mountains, and in meadows in New England hills, where the streams 
Bessel ah 4 cae 
beguiled me back into the woodlands and through them to where be- 
yond still other meadows lay, through grasses and out of sight under 
grasses till you could only tell the water was not lost or was not asleep 
by leaning ear on the grass, and hearing the chimes of it sweet as 
vesper bells in the days gone by; and in the Berkshire Hills of Massa- 
chusetts and the Derbyshire district in England, and where in an island 
a runnel hurried to the sea as it were to keep tryst with her he loved, 
and many a rivulet near the seashore where the waters lingered, as if 
now that the great sea was so near it feared to take the last step of the 
journey and have not any home on land forever, and the salt tides of 
sea ran up and took the rivulet on its breast and bore it back far up 
where the marsh grasses floated upstream with the tides,—I have seen 
water courses everywhere, but not one have I seen not sinuous as a 
swallow’s flight. 
Streams flow to the point of least resistance (really, I feel proud of 
that sentence. It has a weighty sound. | feel scientific. If 1 am not 
142 
