Nature has many secrets all her own. We peer and search. With her ill moods we quarrel. Over her savageries we weep or rage. In her amethystine hours of ease and rest we rest also and wonder, moved to profound and regal melancholy over our own brief hours in her light, to unreasoned joy and laughter over her beauty in her better moods, their pensive exaltation. As for myself, I only know that whenever I see these birds, their coats of fused slate and bright metallic colors shielding them so smoothly, their feet of coral, their eyes of liquid black, smooth-rimmed with pink, and strutting so soberly at ease on every barn roof or walk or turning, awing, in some heavenly light against a sky of blue or storm-black--I only know that once more a fugue of most delicate and airy mood is being fingered, that the rendition of another song is at hand. To fly so! To be a part of sky, sunlight, air! To be thus so delicately and gracefully organized as to be able to rest upon the bosom of a breeze, or run down its curving surface in long flights, to have the whole world-side for a spectacle, the sunny roof of a barn or a house for a home! Not to brood over the immensities, perhaps, not to sigh over the too-well-known end! Fold you your hands and gaze.... They speak of joy accomplished. Fold your hands and gaze. As you look you have that which they bring--beauty. It is without flaw and without price. ON BEING POOR Poverty is so relative. I have lived to be thirty-two now, and am just beginning to find that out. Hitherto, in no vague way, poverty to me seemed to be indivisibly united with the lack of money. And this in the face of a long series of experiences which should have proved to any sane person that this was only relatively true. Without money, or at times with so little that an ordinary day laborer would have scoffed at my supply, I still found myself meditating gloomily and with much show of reason upon the poverty of others. But what I was really complaining of, if I had only known, was not poverty of material equipment (many of those whom I pitied were materially as well if not better supplied than I was) but poverty of mind, the most dreadful and inhibiting and destroying of all forms of poverty. There are others, of course: Poverty of strength, of courage, of skill. And in respect to no one of these have I been rich, but poverty of mind, of the understanding, of taste, of imagination--therein lies the true misery, the freezing degradation of life.