Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/74

56 the narrow wooden bridge over the brook they turn aside, as by a common impulse, to lean over the rail and look down into the water. When I get there I shall do the same thing. So will every man that comes along, unless he happens to be on "business."

Running water is one of the universal parables, appealing to something primitive and ineradicable in human nature. Day and night it preaches—sermons without words. It is every man's friend. The most stolid find it good company. For that reason, largely, men love to fish. They are poets without knowing it. They have never read a line of verse since they outgrew Mother Goose; they never consciously admire a landscape; they care nothing for a picture, unless it is a caricature, or tells a story; but they cannot cross moving water without feeling its charm.

Well, in that sense of the word, I too am a poet. The tramps and I have met and passed each other, and I am on the bridge. The current is almost imperceptible (like the passage of time), and the black water