“Mammy gwine make some short’nin’, short’nin’, Mammy gwine make some short’nin’ cake. Ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’, short’nin’, Ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’ cake,” in an ecstasy of pure delight, which was not remotely induced by common hunger. Short’nin’ cake, angel-cake, floating island, coffee jelly--are they not victuals _spirituels_, drifted deep with frosting, honeyed over with an amber-beaded sweat, with melting sweetness, insubstantial, impalpable, ethereal, that vanish into the brain, that thrill along the nerves, feeding not the body, not the mind, nor yet the spirit, for these are but three of our four elements--we are also the stuff that dreams are made of, and we cannot wholly subsist on more material fare. What makes pie pie is its four-and-twenty-blackbirds. Singing-blackbird pie is the only pie, whether you make it of apples or rhubarb or custard or squash, with one crust or two. He dreamed a dream who made the original pie. And even now I cannot pass a baker in apron and paper cap without a sense of frostings and méringues--of the white of life separated from the yolk of life and stirred into a dream. I find the same touch of romance on many faces, both young and old, as I find it over the landscape at dusk and dawn, and on certain days even at high noon. It was so this morning when a flock of migrating bluebirds went over, calling down to me. They came out of the dawn, hovered idly over the barn and the tops of the cedars in the pasture, then faded into the blue about them and beyond them, where a fleet of great white clouds was drifting slowly far off to the south. But their plaintive voices floating down to me I still hear calling, with more yearning than a man, perhaps, should allow himself to know. For at the first sip of such sweet misery some poet chides, “Why thus longing, thus forever sighing For the far-off, unattained and dim, While the beautiful, all about us lying, Offers up its low perpetual hymn?” As if longing were a weakness and not the heart’s hope; and our sighing-- Shall I sigh for what I have? Or stop sighing? Some of my possessions I may well sigh over, but there are very few to sigh for, seeing none of them are farther off than the barn or the line fence, except a few books that I have lent my friends, and now and then a few dollars. And such is the magic in the morning light that I see the beautiful all about me lying--in the bend of the road, on the sweep of the meadow, across the commonplace dooryard asleep in the sun; and such is the sweet silence of the autumn day that I hear the low perpetual hymn--in the lingering notes of the bluebirds, in the strumming of the crickets, in the curving stems of the goldenrods, the loud humming of the aster-dusted bees, even in the wavering red leaves of the maples singing in their fall.