It was spring again, a Sunday in early May, warm, humid, scented with blossoms that were bodied souls of the laughing air.  They starred the bank that fell away from my porch to the clear-watered river, and they sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively, defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but joyous first pair of lovers.  I marvel that so many are fooled by the trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless—­has never even wearied.  The blossoms told this secret now in quiet triumph over the denials of ancient oaks that towered above them and murmured solemn falsities in their tops about the incredible oldness of things.

There was the star-shaped bloodroot, with its ten or a dozen petals of waxen white set with jewel-like precision about a centre of dead gold.  There was the less formal phlox of a pinkish purple; deer’s-tongue, white and yellow; frail anemones, both pink and white; small but stately violets, and the wake-robin with its wine-red centre among long green leaves.  There was a dogwood in the act of unfolding its little green tents that would presently be snow-white, and a plum tree ruffled with tiny flowers of a honied fragrance.

With a fine Japanese restraint, Clem had placed a single bough of these in a dull-colored vase on my out-of-doors breakfast table.

All these were to say that the soul of the world is ageless, and that time is but a cheap device to measure our infirmities.  Above, the trees were hinting that life might still be lived acceptably, as in Eden days; though they seemed to suspect that the stage of it to which they were amazedly awakening must be at least the autumn, and timidly clothed themselves accordingly.  The elm, the first big tree to stir in its sleep, showed tiny, curled leaflets of a doubting, yellowish green; and the later moving oaks were frankly sceptical, one glowing faintly brown and crimson, another silvery gray and pink.  They would need at least ten more days to convince them into downright summer greenery, even though slender-throated doves already mated in their tops with a perfect confidence.

It was an early morning hour, when it was easy to believe in the perfect fitness of Little Arcady’s name; an hour in a time when the Potts-troubled waters had been mercifully stilled by the hand of God; an hour when the spirit of each Little Arcadian might share to its own fulness in the large serenity of the ageless world-soul.

I recalled Mrs. Potts’s paper on “The Lesson of Greek Art,” which had enriched two columns of the Argus after its reading to the ladies of the Literary and Home Study Club.  It seemed to me that the Greeks must have divined this important secret of the vegetable world—­the secret of ageless time—­and that therein lay the charm of them; that spirit of ever freshening joy which they chiselled and sang into tangible grace for us of a later and heavier age.