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And while Youth and its Laughter a chaos of color and shrill crescendos was surging back and forth across the flower-wreathed piazzas, and violins were wheedling, and Japanese lanterns drunk with candle light were bobbing gaily in the balsam-scented breeze, little Eve Edgarton, up-stairs in her own room, was kneeling crampishly on the floor by the open window, with her chin on the window-sill, staring quizzically down down down on all that joy and novelty, till her father called her a trifle impatiently at last from his microscope table on the other side of the room.
Broken in health, he had turned wearily from the rush and clamor of the city to the clear, balsam-scented air of the woods, where he was fast gaining a health and vigor that he had not believed possible. Out of a lean face, tanned by exposure and wrinkled with kindly humor, a pair of keen gray eyes looked with never-flagging interest upon the busy world about him.
Spring came, as it always comes in that snow-washed northern land, with a ramp of the ice loosening its grip from the turbulent waters, and a whirr of the birds winging north in long, high, wedge-shaped lines, and a crunching of the icefloes riding turbulently out to sea, and a piping of the odorous spring winds through the resinous balsam-scented woods.
Far away on all sides rise the mountain peaks, their snow caps jauntily adjusted and their cloaks of ice drawn close about their shoulders. Then the balsam-scented air, and the dew-laden bushes along the chattering little stream as it flows over a chaos of broken granite or works itself into a boiling froth, only to jump headlong into a quiet green pool. Can you beat it?"
Even groping through a balsam-scented darkness with one hand clasping the thrilly fingers of a lovely young girl, this distaste did not altogether leave him. "This this mush that you speak of?" he questioned quite abruptly. "With the dogs as as nervous as you say, so unfortunately liable to stampede?
He laughed softly as he thought of the old John Keith "Johnny" they used to call him up and down the few balsam-scented streets his father's right-hand man mentally but a little off feed, as his chum, Reddy McTabb, used to say, when it came to the matter of muscle and brawn. He could look back on things without excitement now.
It was Parents and the Lay Reader. All three breathless, all three excited, all three reproachful, they swept into the warm, balsam-scented Rattle-Pane House with a gust of frost, a threat of disaster. "F lame," sighed her Father. "Flame!" scolded her Mother. "Flame?" implored the Lay Reader. "What a pretty name," beamed the Master of the House.
But the echo's laugh was a phantasy of mist and dawn and inestimable balsam-scented spaces where little green ferns and little brown beasties and soft-breasted birdlings frolicked eternally in pristine sweetness. Seven miles further down the lake, at the beginning of the rapids, the Indian Guide spoke again.
Then he would slip away to the balsam-scented hilltop and be perfectly happy sweeping the chapel floor, dusting the pews, polishing the brasswork, rearranging the hymnals in the racks.
The talk seemed already to have taken us away from all pleasure in the prospect; I said, as we found our way through the rich, balsam-scented twilight of the woods, where one joy-haunted thrush was still singing: "You know that in America the law is careful not to meddle with a man's private affairs, and we don't attempt to legislate personal virtue."
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