"Yes, this June air, laden with the odors of these sweet old-style roses and grape-blossoms, intoxicates me. These mountains lift me up. These birds set my nerves tingling like one of Beethoven's symphonies, played by Thomas's orchestra. In neither case do I know what the music means, but I recognize a divine harmony. Never before have I been conscious of such a rare and fine exhilaration. My mood is the product of an exceptional combination of causes, and they have culminated in this old garden. You know, too, that I am a creature of the night, and my faculties are always at their best as darkness comes on. I may seem to you obtuseness itself, but I feel as if I had been endowed with a spiritual and almost unerring discernment. In my sensitive and highly wrought condition, I know that the least incongruity or discord in sight or sound would jar painfully. Yes, laugh at me if you will, but nevertheless I'm going to speak my thoughts with no more restraint than these birds are under. I'm going back for a moment to the primitive condition of society, when there were no disguises. You are the mystery of this garden--you who come from New York, where you seem to have lived without the shelter of home life, to have obtained your livelihood among conventional and artificial people, and to whom the false, complicated world must be well known, and yet you make no more discord in this garden than the first woman would have made. You are in harmony with every leaf, with every flower, and every sound; with that child playing here and there; with the daisies in the orchard; with the little brown mother, whose children you feared might take cold. Hush!" I said, with a deprecatory gesture, "I will speak my mind. Never before in my life have I enjoyed the utter absence of concealment. In the city one must use words to hide thoughts more often than to express them, but here, in this old garden, I intend to reproduce for a brief moment one of the conditions of Eden, and to speak as frankly as the first man could have spoken. I am not jesting either, nor am I irreverent. I say, in all sincerity, you are the mystery of this garden--you who come from New York, and from a life in which your own true womanhood has been your protection; and yet if, as of old, God should walk in this garden in the cool of the day, it seems to me you would not be afraid. Such is the impression--given without reserve--that you make on me--you whom I have just seen, as it were!" As she realized my sincerity she looked at me with an expression of strong perplexity and surprise. "Truly, Mr. Morton," she said slowly, "you are in a strange, unnatural mood this evening." "I seem so," I replied, "because absolutely true to nature. See how far astray from Eden we all are! I have merely for a moment spoken my thoughts without disguise, and you look as if you doubted my sanity." "I must doubt your judgment," she said, turning away.