Page:The story of Mary MacLane (IA storyofmarymacla00macliala).pdf/217



N THESE days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.

My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once—green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness, and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness—it is