felt like this before. It must be the spring air! It is as frightening as it is
pleasant.” He fumbled among the papers in his pockets.
“These will give me something else to think about,” he said, as he
glanced at the first page. “Lady Sigbrith, An Original Tragedy in Five
Acts,” he read. “Why, what's this? It's in my own handwriting too. Have I
written a tragedy? The Intrigue on the Ramparts, or The Great Fast Day - a
Vaudeville. Where did that come from? Someone must have slipped it in my
pocket. And here's a letter.” It was from the board of directors of the theatre,
who rejected his plays, and the letter was anything but politely phrased.
“Hem, hem!” said the copying clerk as he sat down on a bench. His
thoughts were lively and his heart sensitive. He plucked a flower at random,
an ordinary little daisy. What the professor of botany requires several
lectures to explain to us, this flower told in a moment. It told of the mystery
birth, and of the power of the sunlight which opened those delicate leaves
and gave them their fragrance. This made him think of the battle of life,
which arouses emotions within us in similar fashion. Air and light are the
flowers' lovers, but light is her favorite. Toward it the flower is ever turning,
and only when the light is gone does she fold her petals and sleep in the
air's embrace.
“It is the light that makes me lovely,” the flower said.
“But,” the poet's voice whispered, “the air enables you to breathe.”
Not far away, a boy was splashing in a muddy ditch with his stick. As the
water flew up among the green branches, the clerk thought of the
innumerable microscopic creatures in the splashing drops. For them to be
splashed so high, was as if we were to be tossed up into the clouds. As the
clerk thought of these things, and of the great change that had come over
him, he smiled and said:
“I must be asleep and dreaming. It's marvelous to be able to dream so
naturally, and yet to know all along that this is a dream. I hope I can recall
every bit of it tomorrow, when I wake up. I seem to feel unusually
exhilarated. How clearly I understand things, and how wide awake I feel!
