SUMMER’S LEASE. 
We had barely said “ It is spring,” and spring was 
gone. Surely never before sped any springtide away 
on such swift sandals as this, so that I stand amazed, like 
the Monk Felix, who listened to the snow-white bird 
for an hundred years that were but as a summer noon 
for him, and marvel vainly at this stealthy flitting of 
the Bird of Time. “ Faster than fairies, faster than 
witches,” the radiant emissaries of spring have travelled 
by us; it even seems long already since the lilac plumes 
rusted on the bough, and the brief glories of hawthorn 
and laburnum illumined branches no longer rose and 
white and golden now, but merely green, the pleasant 
green of young summer. It is not, however, precisely 
a sense of loss that holds one, but rather the vague 
impression that something precious has slipped through 
one’s fingers unawares; of having, as it might be, 
dozed through the most perfect passage of a song you may 
not chance to hear again. Down the long garden walks, 
and all through the wilderness, the air is sweet with the 
strange, penetrating perfume of syringa—the Mock 
Orange, as they used to have it—with its small chalices 
of amber-centred ivory, haunted, wheresoever they may 
flower, by thronging ghosts—souls of summers dead and 
gone. Here, too, are bowers of amethyst and pearl, dark 
towers of rhododendron lighted up by torches of pale or 
rosy flame; and soon the dim places of the underwoods 
will be lit with sudden fires of the St. John’s wort, glow¬ 
ing like cressets of burnished gold along the ground. 
