Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/302

Rh Edward can go in the carryall, and take Matilda Jane and the rest of the family. He will like to deliver his piece to the trees before he speaks it on commencement day. College wears on Edward ; studies too hard. Let him run out to grass a little up at Gove's Corner; 'twill do him good. I want a little smell of the country; so you do. How red your eyes are! 'Twill do us all good." So they agree, and both think of the mothers that bore them, and of their own early days in the little country town, poor days, and yet how rich. They remember the little school-house and the mill, the meeting-house and the singing school they went to once, when music was not the most important business they attended to. Going separate, and coming home together; first two, next one, and finally many, in this wonderful human arithmetic!

The next morning before the first bell rung, they were at the old place where his father lived once, and his brother now; her father lives yet the other side of the hill, near the meeting-house. They will go there in the afternoon.

What green beauty there is all around! How handsome is the white clover which the city horse greedily fills his mouth withal, as Mr Welltodo and brother 'Zekiel lead the good-natured creature to the barn! The grocer follows the example, and has a head of clover in his mouth also,—sweeter than the cloves he put there yesterday. How delicate the leaf is; how nicely framed together! No city jeweller unites metals with such nice economy of material, or fits them with such accuracy of joint. What well-finished tracery on the leaf! Nay, the honey-bee who has been feeding thereon flies off in a graceful curve, and on wings of what beauty ! How handsome the old elm tree is ; how lovely the outline of its great round top! "That tree would weigh forty tons," says Mr Welltodo, "89,600 pounds; yet it seems to weigh nothing at all. There ! that robin flies right through it as if it were but a green cloud. How attractive the colour; such a repose for the eye! Dear little bits o'babie is never cradled so soft as my eye reposes on that mass of green. But how pleasantly the colour of the ash-gray bark contrasts with the grass beneath, the boughs above ! Look there, how handsomely the great branches part off from the trunk,