Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/380



PRING comes tardily but none the less beautifully to that country which may be said to lie in the lap of the Great Lakes. It comes with a sense of release after imprisonment, of abandonment after re- straint, of tenderness after tempest. It comes with a more riotous surrender of bud and leaf and blossom, a more rhapsodic outburst from April's innumerable choir- ing throats, a more impassioned craving for loveliness in every azure-mirroring runnel and trillium-starred valley and robin-haunted hillside. It comes over lake and field and pine land and burgeoning orchard with the breath of a thousand strange odours, as silvery sweet as wind-blown bugles, transforming umber into emerald, awakening magically into life that Sleeping Beauty known as Earth and arraying her in a radiance so etherealized that man, beholding it, finds his vernal gladness in some way shot through with sadness and the immemorial rapture of liv- ing in some way touched with tears.

Storrow, once more installed at Pine-Brae, beheld this return of Spring to his native land, and beheld it with a confusion of feelings. He was not altogether happy, and he was not altogether unhappy. Periods of vague restlessness seemed to alternate with periods of content- ment equally indeterminate. But he remained, on the whole, in a neutral zone of toleration touched with ex- pectancy, as though somewhere and at some unlooked-for time the even tenor of his life might snap off into tumult, tumult like that of a white- watering rapid snatching the sluggishness out of a river. He was oppressed at times with a feeling of convalescence, as though he were emerg- 370