Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/233

Rh is well known that people who live in the tropics seldom know their own age. How should they, with nothing to distinguish one time of year from another? Young or old, they have never learned that "there are four seasons in the year."

We are better off. Life with us is not all in the present tense. As Hamlet said, we look before and after. (Hence it is, I suppose, that we have "such large discourse," and continue, some of us, to write compositions.) We live by expectation. "Behold," says the weather, "I make all things new." Every day is another one, and every season also. At this very minute a miraculous change is at hand. A great and effectual door is about to swing on its hinges, and I, for one, wish to be awake to see it; not to wake up by and by and find the door wide open.

So far from wearying of the seasons as an old story, I am more intensely interested in them than ever. If any of my fellow citizens are not just now thinking daily of the passing of winter and the advent of spring, I should like to know what they are made