sediment on the shore of a summer sea.  Eternity stretched forward, also, to the time when this perpendicular wall shall have been worn to a gentle slope, clad with luxuriant verdure, and adorned, perchance, with fairer flowers than any which earth now knows; still forward through other untold ages to the time when all earth’s fires shall have cooled; when wind, rain, storm and flood, shall have carried even the slope to the sea and made this planet a plain like Mars.  Now is the golden age; this hour is the center of eternity.

* * * * *

Red tints of the sunrise brightened into yellow, then followed the white light of an August day.  Now the morning mist has gone; woods, fields and river lie silent in the hot, bright, apathetic morning.  Peace reigns over the smiling fields where Plenty pours from her golden horn.  Here, on the ridge at the top of the cliff, the woods stretch back half a mile to meet the prairie.  Straight down from the red cedars on the brink of the rock the river softly eddies round a huge boulder,—­the remnant of some cliff tragedy countless years ago.  In the rent of the rock from which it fell a turkey-buzzard often sits and spreads her huge wings as the boats glide by.  Storms have scalloped pockets in the softer strata; in them still hang the phoebe’s nests, which were filled with young birds in June.  Here and there a swallow’s hole may be seen in the rock; earlier in the season the young birds often peeped out from these holes as if wishing for strength to come speedily to their wings.  Across the river there is a wide beach where the low water makes ripple-marks in the sand.  Narrow leaves of sand-bar willows fringe the shore, and back of these are the shining leaves of the oaks.  Down the river there are glimpses of the fields,—­yellow stubble where the grain has been cut, serried ranks of the green and tan where the far-flung guidons of the tasselled corn stretch away up the slope like a mighty army to demolish the cloud-castles of refuge on the far horizon where the mists fled for safety from the pursuing rays of the sun.  Overhead the oak-leaves are motionless, like the comforting, brooding wings of Peace.  It is a time for rest and quiet joy in the beauty and the fulness of the year.  Now, in the grateful shade of some friendly old oak, is the time to “loaf and invite my soul.”

[Illustration:  “Grateful shade of some friendly old oak” (p. 63)]

[Illustration:  “Fat from A summer’s feeding” (p. 63)]

* * * * *

Happy is the man who has made a companion of some fine old tree standing near his home, type of the tree which he loved in his boyhood, perchance the very same huge white oak.  He learns to go to it as he would to his friend, to let the old tree share his sorrows and his joys.  Others may be heedless of its charm, ignorant of its power to help, but for him it always has a welcome and a ministry of beauty.  He learns to visit it often, to talk to it in his thoughts.  Some dreamy summer morning he muses on its history, its service to mankind.  The old tree seems to bend its branches down to listen as he says: