to show me how to withstand adversity.  And I have watched your pendulous blossoms daily grow more beautiful among the miracles of early May when the sunshine of the flower-spangled days made you a vision of tender green and gold.  I have seen your tiny leaves creep out of their protecting bud-scales in the springtime, their upper surfaces touched with a pink more lovely than that on the cheek of a child, while below they were clothed with a silvery softness more delicately fair than the coverlid in the cradle of a king.  I have watched them develop into full-grown leaves with lobes as rounded and finely formed as the tips of ladies’ fingers and I have noted how well the mass of your foliage has protected your feathered friends and their naked nestlings from the peltings of the hail, the drenchings of the rain and the scorching of the summer sun.  I have gloried in the grateful shade you gave alike to happy children in their play and to tired parents weary and worn with the work and the worry of the world; and it was then, old tree, that you taught me to be sympathetic and hospitable.  And I have watched your fruit ripen and fall, to be eagerly seized by the wild folk of the woodland and stored, some of it in the holes of your own trunk, for use during the long winter.  You taught me to be generous and they gave me lessons in forethought and frugality.  Later in the autumn I have watched your green leaves take on a wondrous wine-red beauty, as the splendor of a soul sometimes shines most vividly in the hour before it is called home; and they taught me not to grieve or to murmur because death must come to us all.  In the winter I have seen the squirrel digging beneath the snow to find the acorns he had planted in the fall.  He didn’t find them all; some of them came up in the springtime as tiny trees and spoke to me of the life that knows no end.”

* * * * *

Now a woodchuck, fat from a summer’s feeding, climbs heavily to a tree stump and seats himself to pass the morning in his favorite avocation of doing nothing.  He worked during the night or the very early morning, for fresh dirt lay at the entrance to his hole.  Evidently he had been enlarging it for the winter.  Like a Plato at his philosophies he sits now, slowly moving his head from side to side, as if steeping his senses in the beauty of the world around him so that all the dreams of his long winter sleep shall be pleasant.  A persistent fly, a slap, and the woodchuck hears.  He turns that dark gray, solemn looking face, and asks mutely, reproachfully, perhaps resentfully, why his reverie has been disturbed.  Then he hastily scurries to his burrow and he will not again appear though I sit here all day.

[Illustration:  “He turns that solemn face” (p. 71)]