Then from near bushes another music streamed, three notes of purity, the last one twice repeated; notes at intervals true to the human scale but sung as no one sings them except a white-throated sparrow who has come home to April in New England. But even under the glow of this music Reuben's human brain must at once observe how bounteous nature includes the porcupine's quill festering in helpless flesh, the needle teeth of a weasel in a rabbit's neck, the scar on Ben Cory's lip, the drop of a hawk, smallpox, the death of Deerfield, a pencil sketch of unredeemable sorrow in Mr. Welland's surgery, the husband-eating habits of spiders, the right eye of the boy Wilks gouged out by a cutlass; and so it would seem there's no help for it, but the brain must continue, trying in some confusion to kill wolves and learn how to be content with discontent. It will not say: _What is man, that thou art mindful of him?_ Such mock humility, Reuben thought, is iniquitous rubbish, in the presence of the whitethroat's music and the drawings of Vesalius, for if the human creature and the sparrow are not beings of wonder and infinite depth then nothing is wonderful under the North Star. On cool mornings after fog, Ben Cory liked to search out the green of poplar bark still damp, a green softer and stranger than any other on earth, seeming translucent, leading the mind to green oceans. Ben Cory knew as well as anyone that the country beyond the magic of poplar bark is not to be entered, and may be declared what you will. There as here, like the reed of the horned god demanding and perilous, the west winds move beyond the green land and over blue-green waves remote from land. * * * * * The days crawled with inky toil into another Saturday afternoon, and Ben Cory was once more free to invade Boston. This time he could ride his mare to the Jenks house--ride like a gentleman, with a solid determination not to fall from grace, no, not in the lightest particular.