Barbour County index. [volume] (Medicine Lodge, Kan.) 1880-current, 1909-06-23

OF yours will still the voices Of tn,
sirens, and no silken sails that you
can furnish will turn him from the
magical horizon. The isles are float.
ing on furlong still before Sit still
a while and wait on the sands. Some
day he will sail YEARLY back, looking
for the love that he never found else
where, to find when he returns, may
hap, only the runes and the deSolate
water-markS. Now is your time, old
fellow. Take yourself by the hand, let
yourself climb up on your knees and
enfold you in protective innocence and
reproach you with warm kisses. There
is millennial touch in it, believe me,
for you will have gotten rid of your
carnivorous egotism and will lie down
with the lamb. A touch of prophecy,
too, If you will but remember. For is
1t not written that a little child shall
lead them?"
Literally to renew ones youth, &C
cording to the doctors prescription.
turned out to be a series of gracious
surprises. With Charles hand in mine
gladly turned into revelations. We
took up with some toys in our mag
nations, and let the real fairies into
our experiences, so that little curtains
were lifted all around us on worlds
unrealized
One hot day we lay fiat on our stom-
achs under the shade of a beech,
among the June grass and the daisies,
peering down into a magical spec
tacle, and yet it was the planets his
tory in petto. The great loom Of the
universe was working there with mini
allure continents. 1t was a paleonto-
logical glimpse of the pre-world, as if
nature kept ceaseless memoranda in
shorthand of all her monstrous cycles
OF change. There were the equatorial
forests and the prehistoric monsters.
All one had to do was to get the in
verse scale adapted, and the gigantic
fronds waved their plumes, and
strange forms of life wandered
through. Green leviathans crouched
in corners; scurrying termites ran
hither and thither. A slow-moving an
gleworm drew his ophidian length
along the ancient geologic reaches,
and an armored pterodactyl, in the
shape of dragon fly. came in flaming
gorgeousness like Apollyon, and picked
up an 1nhabitant or two. Here was the
Oldest Nibelungen Lied going on still,
with real dragons amid the real ele-
ments in this demiurgic workshop.
Somehow l fancy that Wagner, when
he heard the eternal melodies, must
have been lying on his stomach and
looking at the eternal animate forces.
But what is the use of trying to get
these child-like experiences over into
literature? One must be a Thoreau to
do it. When l Intercepted the mys-
teries like Hamlet, there was Charlie
with his round, implicit face, and he
seemed to say, to me: you want to
know the secret of nature; well, you
will have to become an obedient part
of it, then you will know, but you will
lose the power and the desire to tell
it."
That boy never makes any demon
stration over a SUNRISE and he looks
at me wonderingly when 1 begin to
caVort and effuse. He seems to be
more familiar with the processes than
l am. They are spectacles and epi-
sodes to me. Heavens, it is always
sunrise with him; why make such a.
fuss over it? And that is the way with
souls that live close to nature-they
take 1t as matter of course because
they are part of it, and that is where
COOD0F tote
Natty Bumppo, who was always going
about attitudinizing and philosophizing
about that which such a man would
unconsciously appropriate. Even Poe
with all his genius, failed to lie on his
stomach and look into the grasses of
the field. His Raven" and his anna
bel Lee" are not arrayed like one of
these. Fancy him writing the Flow
er de Luce" of Longfellow. or the
Chamoered Nautilus" of Holmes or
the Water Fowl" of Bryant. If he had
been guided by the implicit faith of
the boy, he would have taken the adj
Vice OF the guide in Dante's Inferno"
when he came to some of the horrors.
Look. and pass on"
l think we grew quite like Brahmins
unoer our mango trees The entire
population of the woods. having come
to the conclusion that we were either
too eheminate or too orthodox to kill
anything, took advantage of our help
lessness. The squirrels came in at
the window in the morning. The wood
chucks sat on their launches on our
wire grass. The rabbits made bur
rows under our hearthstone. We could
hear them scolding their broods at
night and humping their heads against
the flooring. The wood-turtles crawled
In over our sill. and the young ones
dropped out of Charles nocl,atr OF