LETTERS FROM AN OREGON RANCH
faces one dare not recall even in memory lest that long-smouldering pain in the heart blaze up again with all its old-time fierceness. Listening to the rain and the noisy fall of waters from the hillside spring, with the loud roaring of the mountain brook dashing through our little glen, I felt as never before the pathos of those lines in “In Memoriam,”—
“We live within the stranger’s land,
And strangely falls our Christmas eve.”
The next morning, while waiting for Tom to come to breakfast, I stepped out on the porch to see how Christmas really looked in “the stranger’s land.” The scene, though not particularly enlivening, might easily have been worse. High up in one corner of the yard was a melancholy tangle of salmon bushes, skirted on two sides by an old mossy paling-fence and leafless trees; struggling down from this were clumps of wet brown ferns, gaunt mullein stalks, and frowzy-headed thistles; a gray alder was bending over a mossy spring at the end of the porch, rainy tears trickling through its bare branches and splashing into the waters beneath. Farther away were dark ploughed fields; above them, gray mists rolling stormily through the hills; and grayer than all else, “that inverted bowl they call the sky,” its rim resting upon the green coronet of encircling hills. This might seem a gloomy picture; in reality, it was one of tender and shadowy beauty. The sublimity
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