_May 13th._ The world is all in a mist this morning as the sky blossoms above the eastern hills. The wren sings first, bringing the tears for which my lids have burned all night. A cardinal calls somewhere—_Cheer! Cheer!_—no, it is a mocking-bird, for his own notes bubble out after his cardinal call, before he wanders into a thrasher’s song, repeating his notes as carefully as “the wise thrush” himself. There he is, on the topmost twig of that mist-dimmed oak. He has tuned his voice to the oriole’s carol now, but again his own notes bubble through. Now he scolds like an angry wren, following the tirade with harsh cries and the blackbird’s censorious _tsck!_ Then he slips into a catbird melody—a jumble of music, jeering, and captious squawks. Gradually the music overflows all else. Clearer and sweeter grow the notes, slow, soft, and wondrous pure. His head is thrown up in rapture while the flood of melody rises and swells till it sweeps him bodily into air. He opens his mist-gray wings and tail, spreading to the light the gleaming white of the in-folded feathers, and rises through the vapors to clearer air, singing as one to whom all mists are crystal clearness, all darkness as the light. He trembles at the height an instant, poised above the vapor-shrouded earth, while his song floats upward to the heaven of which it speaks,—a blending of calm and rapture, of aspiration and peace. Back to his perch he falls, still singing, content with earth as with heaven, and rises once again, to poise an instant, to fall, to rise, again and yet again. It is the Song of the Open Vision. Haunting, appealing, alluring, the rapturous notes search the listener’s heart to draw response from every memory of mist-drenched darkness dissolved in growing light. * * * * * _May 14th._ The Peon is the comfort of my life. I dreaded telling him about Caro, and behold, he knew all about it! Cousin Chad had been in town and came out on the same train with him yesterday afternoon. He couldn’t refrain from crowing a little about Caro and his dear Jane—so capable and sensible, so equal to every emergency. And it was her doing, after all: I know she never intended for me to know it. But she met Caro in the road on her way back from Grace’s that day, and made the child go by home with her. Then she—to quote Cousin Chad—“was able to make her see the indelicacy of her establishing herself in the same house with a young man whom gossips were accusing her of trying to capture!” The Peon at this point expressed polite dissent from Cousin Chad’s approval of his wife’s tactful performance; and my pious relative waxed righteously indignant, and assumed the air of a protector of the defenceless orphan. Whereupon the Peon took refuge in his paper and Cousin Chad simmered in that condemnatory silence of his which always seemed to me worse than any possible swear-words.