A Window in Arcady 
shadow of the wood’s edge where dittany and pennyroyal 
grow. As the pungent fragrance of the crushed plants fills 
the chambers of your being you are back in a twinkling— 
you are startled to think how many summers—to your 
childhood’s home among the hills, where this time of the 
year it was one of the season’s special joys to tramp off 
with the family herbalist in quest of plants of virtue against 
the coming winter’s ills. People and incidents you had 
clean forgotten throng back into your memory, and with 
them some aftertaste of that blessed undaunted spirit of 
life’s morning; and the old wholesome times that you 
thought gone forever become for the moment a reality 
again. So in the perfumes of an old field where cattle 
would starve, the spirit of a man may find some drops of 
elixir to renew his youth withal. 
August 31. —When poets sing of the stillness of even¬ 
ing they can hardly have in mind an August night in the 
Middle States, which is indeed somewhat a babel of small 
noises. Strolling homeward in the gathering dusk from 
an afternoon’s ramble in the country one has ample oral 
evidence of the active companionship of nature. There is 
the clamor of the katydids and locusts and the cheerful 
chirping of the crickets, the tree frog’s meditative rattle and 
the solemn croak of his cousin green-back in the pool, and 
pervading all is the subtle hum of the ubiquitous mosquito. 
Now and then the mysterious tremolo of the screech owl 
issues from the shadows of some darkling wood lot, to be 
succeeded, perhaps, by the harsher, insistent demand of the 
whip-poor-will—a note that makes one’s heart jump when 
suddenly uttered near-by. Pleasanter than all, however, is 
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