Here I sat and dreamed. I was near home, with time to spare; the wind was perfection, and the day also; I had walked far enough to make a seat welcome, yet not so far as to bring on sluggish fatigue; and everything in sight was pure beauty. Life will be sweet as long as it has such half hours to offer us. Yet somehow, human nature having a perverse trick of letting good suggest its opposite, I found myself, all at once, “In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” I looked at the garden patch and the mowed field, and thought what a strange world it is--ill-made, half-made, or unmade--in which man has to live, or, in our pregnant every-day phrase, to get his living; a world that goes whirling on its axis and revolving round its heat-and-light-giving body,--like a top which a boy has set spinning,--now roasted and parched, now drenched and sodden, now frozen dead; a world wherein, as our good American stoic complained, a man must burn a candle half the time in order to see to live; a world to which its inhabitants are so poorly adapted that a day of comfortable temperature is matter for surprise and thankfulness; a world which cannot turn round but that men die of heat and by freezing, of thirst and by drowning; a world where all things, appetite and passion, as well as heat and cold, run continually to murderous extremes. A strange world, surely, which men have agreed to justify and condemn in the same breath as the work of supreme wisdom, ruined by original sin. Children will have an explanation. The philosopher says: “My son, we must know how to be ignorant.” So my thoughts ran away with me till the clematis vine and the cherry bushes brought me back to myself. The present hour was good; the birds and the plants were happy; and so was I, though for the moment I had almost forgotten it. The mountain had its old inscrutable, beckoning, admonishing, benignant look. The wise make no complaint. If the world is not the best we could imagine, it is the best we have; and such as it is, it is a pretty comfortable place in vacation time and fair weather. Let me not be among the fools who waste a bright to-day in forecasting dull to-morrows. RED LEAF DAYS “Woods over woods in gay theatric pride.” GOLDSMITH.