Things looked very strange at first; but quickly
they began to change and to put on familiar features. Some magic
scene-shifting seemed to take place before my eyes, till, instead of
the unknown settlement which I had at first seemed to look upon, there
stood the farmhouse at which we had stopped two days before, and at
the same moment we heard the stamping of our team in the barn. We sat
down and laughed heartily over our good luck. Our desperate venture
had resulted better than we had dared to hope, and had shamed our
wisest plans. At the house our arrival had been anticipated about this
time, and dinner was being put upon the table.
It was then five o'clock, so that we had been in the woods just
forty-eight hours; but if time is only phenomenal, as the philosophers
say, and life only in feeling, as the poets aver, we were some months,
if not years, older at that moment than we had been two days before.
Yet younger, too,--though this be a paradox,--for the birches had
infused into us some of their own suppleness and strength. 1869.
VII
THE BLUEBIRD
When Nature made the bluebird she wished to propitiate both the sky
and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and
the hue of the other on his breast, and ordained that his appearance
in the spring should denote that the strife and war between these two
elements was at an end.
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