“Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery; “And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again. “O blessed Bird! the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial faëry place, That is fit home for thee!” I have a great book, published by the Government, devoted entirely to birds’ gizzards, mills of the gods, and their grindings. It is not a dull book, though the mills grind slowly and grind exceeding small. It is a book of bones, of broken beetles, seeds, hairs, feathers, and fragments. It is a great work of science. One might not like to lay it down unfinished; but, having finished it, one could hardly say: “And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again. “O blessed Bird! the earth we Pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial faëry place, That is fit home for thee!” Nature will not do, nor all the truth of nature, for stuff of song and story. As life is more than meat, so is literature more than life. Nature conforms to art; and in fiction “the only real people are those who never existed.” At Good-Will Farm, Maine, there is a rock marked with a copper plate. It had been marked for drill and dynamite, until, one day, my car swung up and over a sharp turn in the road before the schoolhouse, skidding rather horribly on the smooth outcropping ledge which had been uncovered and left as part of the roadbed. “You ought to blast that thing out,” I said, somewhat testily, to the supervisor who came out to greet me, my nerves, strung a bit too tight on the long day’s drive, snapping with the skid here at the very end of the trip. “I’ll do it,” he replied, apologetically. “I had intended to do it from the first.” The next day we were climbing this road on foot, and, standing on the ledge to take in the wide landscape of the Kennebec below us, I chanced to look down at my feet and saw, cut deep in the smooth surface of the stone, several parallel lines. “Don’t blast out this rock!” I exclaimed. “Tear down your schoolhouse rather. Build a new road through the grounds, but leave this stone. This is part of a great book.” “I don’t understand,” said the supervisor. “Here is written a page of the greatest story ever penned. These lines were done by the hand of the glacier who came this way in the Ice Age. Don’t blot it out. Put a fence about it, and a copper plate upon it, translating the story so that your students can read it and understand.” He did. There was no need of the fence; but he set the plate into the rock, telling of the Ice Age, how the glacier came down, ploughing out the valley of the Kennebec, rounding and smoothing this ledge, and inditing this manuscript for Good-Will Farm School ages later.