Joel and his friend did not return immediately to the house with Joel’s mother and her other guests. Instead, leaving old Mr. Joel’s house, they turned left, and struck out for a walk through the fields and slopes and wooded country of the great estate. The day was hot, the broad fields brooded in the powerful and fragrant-clovered scent of afternoon, the woods were dense with tangled mystery, immensely still and green, yet dark incredibly, and filled with drowsy silence, brooding calm, ringing with the lovely music of unnumbered birds, alive with the swift and sudden bullet-thrum of wings, and haunted with the cool and magical incantation of their hidden waters.
It was the wild, sweet, casual, savage, and incredibly lovely earth of America, and of the wilderness, and it haunted them like legends, and pierced them like a sword, and filled them with a wild and swelling prescience of joy that was like sorrow and delight.
They toiled upward through the tangled forest-jungle of a wooded slope, and down again into the cool green-gladed secrecies of a hollow, and up through the wild still music of the woods again and out into the great rude swell of unmown fields, alive with all their brooding potency, their powerful and silent energy of the hot and fragrant earth of three o’clock, the drowsy and tremulous ululation of afternoon.
Their feet trod pathways in the hot and fragrant grasses; where they trod, a million little singing things leaped up to life, and hot dry stalks brushed crudely at their knees: the earth beneath their feet gave back a firm and unsmooth evenness, a lumpy resiliency.
Once in a field before them they saw a tree dense-leaved and burnished by hot light: the sun shone on its leaves with a naked and un-green opacity, and Joel, looking towards it, whispered thoughtfully:
“… Hm… It’s nice, that—I mean the way the light falls on it—It would be hard to paint: I’d like to come out here and try it.”
And the other assented, not, however, without a certain nameless desolation in his heart that broad and naked lights, the white and glacial opacity of brutal day aroused in him—and wanting more the wooded grove, the green-gold magic of a wooded grass, the woodland dark and thrum and tingled mystery, and the sheer sheeting silence of the hidden water.
It was a swelling, casual, nobly lavish earth, for ever haunted by a drowsy spell of time, and the unfathomed mystery of an elfin enchantment,
