Saturday mornings we have good cheer, especially in the winter when it is cold and in here we have lights and breakfast and reading and discussion. We have a comfortable group with our established ways. We need to have better chairs, bigger chairs with wings. But that cannot be helped any more than can the summer.
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At the park the wind comes over the rolling lawns through sunlight. The brown, stagnant waters brim around the tree trunks and the people’s passing voices all are distant. The tree behind me shades the grass over its roots, and on my knee a little red bug and a fly stand as if poised to begin a race. It is as if the shadow of a tree casts with it a shadow of repose.
A little later I walk under a tree of such thick foliage and such deep, arboreal gloom as would out-darken Mirkwood. And in the midst—not above but right inside and looking down—a lamp, as if our patrimonious government had found that wild shade too much for their timid and puling citizens.
June is swimming through the summer like a turtle paddling in the sunlit water. Green and grown and undamaged June! The shade under the wind-whispering trees is of an enjoyment of a moment without monotony, where it seems only the highest of aesthetic indolence can long remain. Why is it June? And why is June so much like a bird: a flash in the skies above, a pause in the branches?
* * *
A homemade concert later. Oh terrible violins! Oh ungraceful oboe! Oh consolations of the soprano and the alto, the mitigations of concerted effort, the general dependability of the plodding violoncello, and the curiosity of a warren like the hobbit hole where the king of the hobbits holds his court.
