Tildy said, once a man was dead, De man commenced to grin, An' limbs growed out, an' dey stayed dere, THE KATYDID IN OPERA. In the season, we have music every night. The silence of a summer night in the country is a silence to which you can listen ; "soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony." Come out in this musical silence for awhile if you "want to hear the old band play; " listen to it night after night, until you have learned to love this melodious stillness, and then if you wish, go back to brick walls and paved streets, and lie down to be lulled to sleep by the varied pleasing of rattling hacks, crashing trucks, thundering fire engines and jingling trolley bells. It is pleasant, as we attend the opera night after night, to note the advent of old favorites. Our artists teach their children to sing and play so exactly like themselves that we scarcely realize we have a new cast every season. We think of it and speak of it, perhaps, in the closing days of summer. The music, I grant you, is somewhat melancholy in the autumn time. There will come some sharp, keen night when the orchestra is very meager. Only a few hardy little musicians appear. And they do not play very long; they cut the opera in every scene, and play only long enough, probably, to save the box receipts, then they pack up their instruments and hurry away to the warmest corners of stack yard and stubble field. We observe on these nights that the voices of the soloists display no hoarseness, however. So long as they do sing, they sing their best. But in spite of that, the autumnal performance on the whole is pathetic. For they choose mournful themes; they sing of the golden summer that is gone, and their music shudders with the dread of frosty nights and the cruel winter that is coming; they play dirges for their dead comrades; they sing of purple aster and royal golden-rod; the plumy lances of the iron weed in old meadows; the yellow prim rose, gleaming like stars in the gray twilight; the ghostly thistle-down,drifting over the reedy marshes where the fireflies died; of grotesque shadows in the old stump lot; of cold winds, creeping with eerie whispers across the fields where the corn stands in ragged shocks with stiffened blades; of wheeling colonies of summer birds that flecked the fields with restless shadows as they gathered the clans together and sped away to the gayety of the winter resorts; of faded ferns in the glens, of withered grasses in the fence corners and blighted flowers in the old-fashioned gardens, until at last the merry voices cease, all the daughters of music are brought low, the last little soloist sings his good-bye song with a brave little trill in his far-reaching voice, and goeth the way of all grasshoppers. * * * * So he sings for us in the lengthening nights. And as he sings, some there are in his audience who hear as in a dream, the songs he sung on yester eve; songs of that happy Past, "whose yesterdays look backward with a smile. " To them his strident solo is a talisman that opens wide the doors of Memoryland, with the old walks we only take when time is swifter than a thought and longer than eternity. Down winding paths beneath the whispering oaks; through tangled grasses in the orchard glooms; across the foot-bridge where the brook goes singing softly all night long; through forest vistas, where the sunset loiters with its benediction to the day- all the dear paths that only lovers know and love; even by shadowed ways that lead through valleys where the damps are chill; through desert paths of tears, and rankling pain, where Marah's waters darken in the solemn pools; and all the way and all the time the clasp of a fluttering hand, the gleam of starlight in the love-lit eyes. Until, at last, the song and the dream lead on to where the singing brook, its laughter silenced and its music hushed, deepens into the darkly flowing river and in the morning light that lights our sun, the shadows pass away forever. Ah, katydid, in other worlds than ours you must have sung and learned new melodies since all the days were gold and all the world was young. For who, in this bright world of ours, this land of hope and song, this sunlit world of happy hearts and summer skies, could teach your tiny harp these minor chords? Where could you learn on all this laughing earth, that Joy and Sorrow, sisters born of Love, walk ever hand in hand? Where could you learn to sing of tears and loneliness? "CHIMES from a JESTER'S BELLS." ROBERT J. BURDETTE. THE GARDENER. And if you ever planted a morning glory seed, which I advise you to do for the sheer pleasure of it-a poor thing brown and hopeless and almost formless in shape or in beauty, but put it in the ground, and the sky will call it, “Come, come! " And if you and I hear what the gardener doth you can hear the morning glory flower saying, “I am coming. " It is like the sleepy voice, that is only half awake, not quite half awake, "Who called me? Was I called?" "Hurry, hurry!" says the wind. "I am getting my things on," says the flower. "Oh, hurry, hurry, hurry!" says the sky, and then above the ground comes the flash of leaves. And then, if you care to mark a miracle, all foul and dispirited, and out of humor apparently with all the world, and with self included, and looks clean down, lips clamped together as with an iron band, and the sky says, "Cheer up! Come on up here, I am waiting for you to flower up here," and then the leaves expand, and the sprangles fling out, and the tendrils climb and climb. Oh, morning glory flower, where are you going, morning glory flower? And the morning glory says, "Into the sky, into the sky, into the sky!" Tendrils fling out, climbing on whatsoever thing there is to climb on, on the wire netting, or the string the child put up, but always climbing into the sky. And the ground says, "You belong down here, you seem to be getting aristocratical. You belong down here. I am your mother. But the morning glory says, "Aye, but the sky is my father. I belong to the sky. And when the summer comes, and the autumn approaches, there is the morning glory with its purple trumpets of flowers and every trumpet, if you had the ear to hear it, and the ear of the poet to listen to what it said, would say, "I belong in the sky. And the gardener believes in the sky. And then the gardener believes in tending. The gardener knows that the sincerest poetry of life is just digging around in the dirt, just that! Oh, beloved, don't you folks get tired just doing the same thing all the time? Woman, have you ever been known to make a word of remark about the dishwashing coming three times a day? Have you? Have you been heard to say that you didn't so much mind to cook, but that the cleaning up hampered your finer sensibilities and that your æsthetical tendencies were hampered by the dish cloth? And if it came only once a week, not to say three times a day, there might be some comfort in preparing a meal, and the garments are around, and the stockings must be fixed for the feet, and the dinner must be fixed for the lips, and things must be done over and over and over. And I confess that I feel with anybody who gets tired of the eternal reiteration of things. But what is the gardener doing? Oh, what he did yesterday, digging in the dirt, digging in the dirt, planting the seeds, digging in the dirt, tending. Oh, Gardener, blessed Gardener, don't get tired digging in the dirt of my heart. Oh, blessed |