Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/166



was spring again, a Sunday in early May, warm, humid, scented with blossoms that were bodied souls of the laughing air. They starred the bank that fell away from my porch to the clear-watered river, and they sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively, defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless—has never even wearied. The blossoms told this secret now in quiet triumph over the denials of ancient oaks that towered above them and murmured solemn falsities in their tops about the incredible oldness of things.

There was the star-shaped bloodroot, with its ten or a dozen petals of waxen white set with jewel-like precision about a centre of dead gold. There was the less formal phlox of a pinkish purple; deer's-tongue, white and yellow; frail anemones, both pink and