The child grew very solemn at her own thoughts, and a feeling as if some one were near troubled her.  She thought the wind must be alive; for it moved, and very swiftly, too, and it had a great many voices.  If she only could know now what they said, perhaps they would tell what life was.  And then she looked up at the aged oaks, as they reared their arms to the sky, and she longed to ask them the question, but dared not.  A small spring leaped down from a a rock above her, and fled past with ceaseless murmurs, and she felt sure that it lived, too, for it moved and had a voice.  And a strong feeling stirred the young soul, a sudden desire to know all things, to hold communion with all things.

Now the day was gone, and the child turned homewards; but she seemed to hear in sleep that night the whispered question, “What is life?” She was yet to know.

The seed had been blown away from a pine tree, and it took root downward and shot green spears upward, until, when a few summers had passed, it had grown so famously that a sparrow built her nest there, among the foliage, and never had her roof been so water-proof before.  There, one day, came a tall, fair girl, with quick step and beaming eyes, and sat down at its root.  One hand caressed lovingly the young pine, and one clasped a folded paper.  How she had grown since she put that brown seed into the earth!  She opened the paper and read; a bright color came to her cheeks, and her hand trembled—­

“He loves me!” said she.  “I cannot doubt it.”

Then she read aloud—­

“When you are mine, I shall carry you away from those old woods where you spend so much precious time dreaming vaguely of the future.  I will teach you what life is.  That its golden hours should not be wasted in idle visions, but made glorious by the exhaustless wealth of love.  True life consists in loving and being loved.”

She closed the letter and gazed around her.  Was this the teaching she had received from those firm old oaks who had so long stood before the storms?  She had learned to know some of their voices, and now they seemed to speak louder than ever, and their word was—­“Endurance!”

The never-silent wind, that paused not, nor went back in its course, had taught her a lesson, also, in its onward flight, its ceaseless exertion to reach some far distant goal.  And the lesson was—­“Hope.”

The ever-flowing spring, whose heart was never dried up either in summer or winter, had murmured to her of—­“Faith.”

She laid her head at the foot of the beloved pine and said, in her heart, “I will come back again when ten years are passed, and will here consider whose teachings were right.”

It was a cold November day.  A rude north wind raved among the leafless oaks that defied its power with their rugged, unclad arms.  The heavy masses of clouds were mirrored darkly in the spring, and the pine, grown to lofty stature, rocked swiftly to and fro as the fierce wind struck it.  Down the hill, over the stones, and through the tempest, there came a slight and bending form.  It was the happy child who had planted the pine seed.