The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-07-16
IN A MOUNTAIN BUNGALOW
Having Tea in Japanese Hung Garden Sure to Bring
 Rain 1n the Afternoon

|, you niay give them they will not look | well in contrast with great h4llsides
 blooming with native flowers. How ignorant I was to attempt any improve ment upon nature! It is in these July
 days that nature has no longer hidden charms. but opens to you world or mature beauty. In May and April days she gives a suggestion of the oncoming summer and by mysteries that We cannot understand touches into life the boughs of the Towering apple tree. In that one miracle alone her enchantment begins and she unfolds beneath the sun by day and the stars by night two worlds of mystery. Here in these forests weeks ago came the awakening. Unseen in the vast silence in the heart of the wood lands the trees put forth their young leaves, which reaching their rounded loveliness have made a foliage so dense that the summer sun glimmers only felntly down these quiet aisles. Such a ceaseess whispering among the naples, the birches and the old gray oaks that the invisible choir seems today to have the added strength of new voices. Per haps with the maturer beauty of the leaves nature has invested them with a riper knowledge and they are just begin ming to understand the mystery of life and death which she teaches in fore doomlng them to moulder upon the earth.
 Ii is in these glowing days that nature has fulfilled her promises made beneath the towering apple orchards and those who follow her paths Into the far wood lands find many deeper Joys that are al- ways held in reserve. for nature so lavish holds unseen and unknown such worlds of happiness that she surprises even those who imagine they understand all her benefcent moods. It Is now that the opportunity comes for her to teach her lesson of repose and of tranquil delight. There is no longer an air of expectancy and preparation. The blossoming trees have dropped their blooms and are ladened with ripening fruit. Tn the still ness of. the July nights you can hear dis tinctly the fall of an apple in the near by orchards and just now the branch of a maple gave little cracking sound and dropped to the earth, startling a tiny brown squirrel and frightening away two woodchucks on neighboring bough. In the meadows the grasses have grown almost as high as the corn and along the readsides beyond the corflelds the black berry bushes which were full of blooms in June are now bearing, and the wheat has been cut in the far-off fields. The whole earth is at its ripest beauty and nature rests before the harvesting time in a world of peace and contentment that is rightfully hers because she has no twinge of conscience for a single neglect ed duty.
 A blue and purple haze lies over the mountains and white clouds rest above them blown about like petals from a huge flower. A little sun drowned boy ploughng in the cornfield pauses without any perceptible reason in the middle of a long row and looks across the stubble and the elder hedges. I have done the same thing often, finding the temptation too great to be resisted, and when I have deliberately stopped to gaze enraptured at tn distant mountains I have seen the silent little figure in the cornfield as if in the wnderful silence about him. he could not break the spell of an hour to which the whole world of nature surrenders mutely.
 ANNIE KENDRICK WALKER.