For a happy forenoon he worked in Neptune’s empty cabin, whose open windows framed blue sky and green woods, and wide, sunny spaces.  He ate the lunch Emma Campbell had fixed for him.  Then he went over to the edge of the River Swamp and lay under a great oak, and slipping his Bible from his pocket, read the Thirty-seventh Psalm that his mother had so loved.  The large, brave, grave words splashed over him like cool water, and the little, hateful things, that had been like festering splinters in his flesh, vanished.  There were flowering bay-trees somewhere near by, diffusing their unforgetable fragrance; the flowering bay is the breath of summer in South Carolina.  He sniffed the familiar odor, and listened to a redbird’s whistle, and to a mocking-bird echoing it; and to the fiddling of grasshoppers, the whispers of trees, the quiet, soft movement of the swamp water.  The long thoughts that came to him in the open crossed his mind as clouds cross the sky, idly, moving slowly, breaking up and drifting with the wind.  A bee buzzed about a spike of blue lobelia; ants moved up and down the trunk of the oak-tree; birds and butterflies came and went.  With his hands under his head, Peter lay so motionless that a great brown water-snake glided upon a branch not ten feet distant, overhanging a brown pool whose depths a spear of sunlight pierced.  The young man had a curious sense of personal detachment, such as comes upon one in isolated places.  He felt himself a part of the one life of the universe, one with the whistling redbird, the toiling ants, the fluttering butterflies, the chirping grasshoppers, the great brown snake, the trees, the water.  The earth breathed audibly against his ear.  He sensed the awefulness and beauty of this oneness of all things, and the immortality of that oneness; and in comparison the littleness of his own personal existence.  With piercing clarity he saw how brief a time he had to work and to experience the beauty and wonder of his universe.  Then, healingly, dreamlessly, wholesomely, he fell asleep, to wake at sunset with a five-mile tramp ahead of him.

Long before he reached Riverton the dark had fallen.  It was an evening of many stars.  The wind carried with it the salty taste of the sea, and the smell of the warm country.

A light burned in his own dining-room, which was sitting-room as well, and a much pleasanter room than his mother had known, for books had accumulated in it, lending it that note books alone can give.  He had added a reading-lamp and a comfortable arm-chair.  Emma Campbell’s flowers, planted in anything from a tomato-can to an old pot, filled the windows with gay blossoms.

Peter found his supper on a covered tray on the kitchen table.  Emma herself had gone off to church.  The Seventh Commandment had no meaning for Emma, she was hazy as to mine and thine, but she clung to church membership.  She was a pious woman, given to strenuous spells of “wrastlin’ wid de Speret.”