As the heart opens to receive the
beauty of the world, as the mind and soul strive, like the plants, for
the highest development, so is the world redeemed from error and crime
and the perfection of the race is attained. If one soul finds this
truth more quickly and easily here amid the trees and flowers, for him
is the old road greater than religious dogmas or social systems.
* * * * *
Always beautiful and interesting, in these long days of mid-July the
old road is at its best. No length of day can measure its loveliness
or encompass its charm. Very early in the morning there is a faint
rustle of the leaves, a delicate flutter through the woods as if the
awakening birds are shaking out their wings. Shrubs and bushes and
trunks of trees have ghostly shapes in the few strange moments that
are neither the darkness nor the dawn. As the light steals through the
woods their forms grow less grotesque. In the half light a phoebe
begins her shrill song. A blue-jay screams. The quail sounds his first
"Bob White." Brown thrashers in the thicket--it is past their time of
singing--respond with a strange, sibilant sound, a mingled hiss and
whistle, far different from his ringing songs of May, now only
memories; different also from her scoldings when she was disturbed on
her nest and from her tender crooning calls to her babies during June.
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