This year as never before I have felt the beauty of the world.  And with the new brightness in which every common scene has been apparelled there has stirred within me a need of human companionship unknown in the past.  It is as if Nature had spread out her last loveliness and said:  “See!  You have before you now all that you can ever get from me!  It is not enough.  Realize this in time.  I am your Mother.  Love me as a child.  But remember! such love can be only a little part of your life.”

Therefore I have spent the month restless, on the eve of change, drawn to Nature, driven from her.  In September it will be different, for then there are more things to do on my small farm, and I see people on account of my grapes and pears.  My malady this August has been an idle mind—­so idle that a letter from Georgiana seems its main event.  This was written from the old home of Audubon on the Hudson, whither they had gone sight-seeing.  It must have been to her much like a pilgrimage to a shrine.  She wrote informally, telling me about the place and enclosing a sprig of cedar from one of the trees in the yard.  Her mind was evidently overflowing on the subject.  It was rather pleasant to have the overflow turned my way.  I shall plant the cedar where it will say always green.

I saw Georgiana once more before he leaving.  The sudden appearance of her brother and cousin, and the new that she would return with them for the summer, spurred me up to make another attempt at those Audubon drawings.

How easy it was to get them!  It is what a man thinks a woman will be willing to do that she seldom does.  But she made a confession.  When she first found that I was a smallish student of birds, she feared I would not like Audubon, since men so often sneer at those who do in a grand way what they can do only in a poor one.  I had another revelation of Georgiana’s more serious nature, which is always aroused by the memory of her father.  There is something beautiful and steadfast in this girl’s soul.  In our hemisphere vines climb round from left to right; if Georgiana loved you she would, if bidden, reverse every law of her nature for you as completely as a vine that you had caused to twine from right to left.

Sylvia enters school the 1st of September, and Georgiana is to be at home then to see to that.  How surely she drives this family before her—­and with as gentle a touch as that of a slow south wind upon the clouds.

Those poor fist drawings of Audubon!  He succeeded; we study his early failures.  The world never studies the failures of those who do not succeed in the end.