They had reached Jackson Park, and sat down for a little rest before they should wend their way on to the lake. "Oh, Ernestine," he said, taking it in in long breaths, feeling the dew upon his face, and hearing the murmur of many living things,--"_tell_ me about it, dear. I want to see it too!" "Karl--every tree looks as though it were just as glad as we are! Can't you feel that the trees feel just as we do about things? The leaves haven't all come out yet, some of them are holding themselves within themselves in a coy little way they have--although intending all the time to come out just as fast as ever they can. And it's that glorious, unspoiled green--the kind nature uses to make painters feel foolish. Oh, nature's having much fun with the painters this morning. Right over there,"--pointing with his finger--"is such a beautiful tree. I like it because all of its branches did not go in the way they were expected to go. Several of them were very perverse children, who mother trunk thought at one time were going to ruin her life, but you know lives aren't so easily ruined after all. 'Now you go right up there at an angle of twenty-two degrees,' she said to her eldest child. 'Not at all,' said the firstborn, 'I intend to lean right over here at whatsoever angle will best express my individuality.' And though the mother grieved for a long time she knows now--Karl--how foolish we are! But listen. You hear that bird who is trying to get all of his soul into his throat at once? He's 'way up there on the top branch, higher than everything else, and so pleased and proud that he is, and he's singing to a little blue cloud straight above him, and I tell you I never saw such blue--such blue within blue. Its outside dress is a very filmy blue, but that's made over an under dress of deeper blue, and there's just a little part in it where you can see right into the heart, and that's a blue so deep and rich it makes you want to cry. And oh, Karl--the heart itself has opened a little now, and you can get a suggestion, just a very indefinite suggestion--but then all inner things are indefinite--that inside the heart of the cloud is its soul, and you are permitted one fleeting glimpse to tell you that the soul of the cloud is such a blue as never was dreamed of on land or on sea." "I can see that cloud," he said,--"and the bird looking up at it, and the tree whose eldest child was so perverse and so--individual." "And, Karl," she went on, in joyous eagerness, "can't you see how the earth heaved a sigh right here a couple of hundred centuries ago--now _don't_ tell me the park commissioners made them!--and that when it settled back from its sigh it never was quite the same again? It was a sigh of content--for the little slopes are so gentle. Gentle little hills are sighs of content, and bigger ones are determinations, and mountains--what are mountains, Karl?"