Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/66

52 or so above the water, the leaves but partially unrolled and looking as if they would withdraw beneath the surface again at night. This I think must be the most conspicuous and forward greenness of the spring. The small reddish, radical leaves of the dock, too, are observed flat on the moist ground as soon as the snow has melted there, as if they had grown beneath it.

Talk about reading! a good reader! It depends on how he is heard. There may be elocution and pronunciation (recitation say) to satiety, but there can be no good reading unless there is good hearing also. It takes two, at least, for this game, as for love, and they must coöperate. The lecturer will read but those parts of his lecture which are best heard. Sometimes, it is true, the faith and spirits of the reader run a little ahead and draw after the good hearing, and at other times the good hearing runs ahead and draws on the good reading. The reader and the hearer are a team not to be harnessed tandem, the poor wheel horse supporting the burden of the shafts, while the leader runs pretty much at will, the lecture lying passive in the painted curricle behind. I saw some men unloading molasses hogsheads from a truck at a depot the other day, by rolling them up an inclined plane. The