the third verse, for example, which tell of four years of hard football practice, are condensed in fifty words. Find passages in the poems of "Making Homes" which, similarly condensed, should be read slowly in order that one may understand their full meaning.

3. NATURE'S SPRING HOUSE-CLEANING

JAMES LANE ALLEN

I love most to see nature do her spring house-cleaning, with the rain-clouds for her water-buckets and the winds for her brooms. What an amount of drenching and sweeping she can do in a day. How she dashes pailful and pailful into every corner, till the whole earth is as clean as a new floor.

Another day she attacks the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last October, and scatters them in a trice, so that every cranny may be sunned and aired. Or, grasping her long brooms by the handles, she will go into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife would brush down cobwebs; so that the released limbs straighten up like a man who has gotten out of debt, and almost say to you, joyfully, "Now, then, we are all right again."

This done, she begins to hang up soft new curtains at the forest windows, and to spread over her floor a new carpet of an emerald loveliness such as no mortal looms could ever have woven. And then, at last, she sends out invitations through the South, and even to some tropical lands for the birds to come and spend the summer. The invitations are sent out in March, and accepted in April and May, and by June her house is full of visitors.

CLASS ACTIVITIES

1. How does nature "attack the piles of dead leaves"?

2. What are nature's "long brooms"?

3. How does nature send out her invitations to the birds?

4. Make a list of all the things people do to help nature in her spring house-cleaning.

5. Read the following poem and find a reason for placing it after "Nature's Spring House-Cleaning.'

4. THE CLOUD

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet birds every one,

When rock'd to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain;
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I am the daughter of earth and water,
And the nursling of the sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain, when with never a stain

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

I rise and upbuild it again.

5. ELLIS PARK

HELEN HOYT

If you live in a city, you know what it means to carry to your work or school some of the beauties of even a tiny park.

Little park that I pass through,

I carry off a piece of you

Every morning hurrying down
To my work-day in the town;
Carry you for country there

To make the city ways more fair.

I take your trees

And your breeze,
Your greenness,

Your cleanness,

Some of your shade, some of your sky,
Some of your calm as I go by;

Your flowers to trim

The pavements grim;

Your space for room in the jostled street,
And grass for carpet to my feet.

Your fountains take and sweet bird calls

To sing me from my office walls.
All that I can see

I carry off with me.

But you never miss my theft,
So much treasure you have left.
As I find you, fresh at morning,
So I find you, home returning,
Nothing lacking from your gia
All your riches wait in place
For me to borrow

On the morrow.

Do you hear this praise of you,
Little park that I pass through?

CLASS ACTIVITIES

1. How could Miss Hoyt, or any one, take away a part of the little park with her?

2. Tell the class about something you pass on the way to school that

you can carry off with you, as Miss Hoyt carries something from the park.

3. What, in the light of "Ellis Park," is the reason for such signs in public parks as "Do not pick the flowers"?

4. Read again "Nature's Spring House-Cleaning" on p. 189. What different memories of spring does James Lane Allen carry with him?

5. Is it possible to "carry off" something from a story or a poem? Explain, using a story or a poem in this book.

6. Explain Emerson's meaning in these lines:

"I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;

I brought him home, in his nest, at even.
He sings his song, but it pleases not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear they sang to my eye."

6. WHO OWNS THE MOUNTAINS?

HENRY VAN DYKE

Then said the lad, lying on the grass beside me, "Father, who owns the mountains?"

I happened to have heard, the day before, of two or three lumber companies that had bought some of the woodland slopes; so I told him their names, adding that there were probably a good many different owners, whose claims taken all together would cover the whole range of hills.

"Well," answered the lad, after a moment of silence, "I don't see what difference that makes. Everybody can look at them."

They lay stretched out before us in the level sunlight, the sharp peaks outlined against the sky, the vast ridges of forest sinking smoothly toward the valleys, the deep hollows gathering purple shadows in their bosoms, and the little foothills standing out in rounded promontories of brighter green from the darker mass behind them.

They were all ours, from crested cliff to wooded base. The solemn groves of firs and spruces, the plumed sierras of lofty

pines, the stately pillared forests of birch and beech, the wild ravines, the tremulous thickets of silvery poplar, the bare peaks with their wide outlooks, and the cool vales resounding with the ceaseless song of little rivers - we knew and loved them all; they ministered peace and joy to us; they were all ours, though we held no title deeds and our ownership had never been recorded.

What is property, after all? The law says there are two kinds, real and personal. But it seems to me that the only real property is that which is truly personal, that which we take into our inner life and make our own forever, by understanding and admiration and sympathy and love. This is the only kind of possession that is worth anything.

What does it profit a man to be the landed proprietor of countless acres unless he can reap the harvest of delight that blooms from every rood of God's earth for the seeing eye and the loving spirit? And who can reap that harvest so closely that there shall not be abundant gleaning left for all mankind? The most that a wide estate can yield to its legal owner is a living. But the real owner can gather from a field of golden-rod, shining in the August sunlight, an unearned increment of delight.

We measure success by accumulation.

The measure is

false. The true measure is appreciation. He who loves most has most.

CLASS ACTIVITIES

1. Give informal talks in class.

a. The story of a flower that is useful.
b. One of our city's "harvests of delight."
c. A "possession" that belongs to all.

d. A harvest which can never be reaped.

e. Places in my neighborhood which take the place of mountains"?

f. A harvest I must learn to reap.

g. Something I possess but do not own.
h. A story from which I reaped delight.