There the meaning of the _Georgics_ was opened to me as it never was before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of the _loetas segetes_ seemed to connect themselves with the smiling scenes about us. The little village lay among broad farm-checkered hills, and the garden behind my house stretched back to the brow of a deep slope. In the cool shadows of the beech trees that edged this hill I used to lie and read through the long summer mornings; and often I would look up from the page, disturbed by the hoarse cawing of the crows as they flew up from the woods or fields nearby and flapped heavily across the valley. The effect of their flight was simple, but laid hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of the poet:
Too happy husbandmen, if but they knew The wonders of their state!
And when wearied of this wider scene I turned to the garden itself, still I was in Virgil's haunted world. Some distance from the house was a group of apple trees, under whose protecting branches stood a row of beehives; and nearby, in a tiny rustic arbor, I could sit through many a golden hour and read, while the hum of bees returning home with their burden of honey sounded in my ears. It was there I learned to enjoy the _levium spectacula rerum_, as he calls the story of his airy tribes; and there in that great quiet of nature,--so wide and solemn that it seemed a reproach against the noisy activities of men,--I learned what the poet meant to signify in those famous lines with which he closes his account of the warring bees:
These mighty battles, all this tumult of the breast, With but a little scattered earth are brought to rest.
In this way Jack's father learned the illusion of life by looking back on his happy days. I did not mean to fill my letter with this long extract from his note-book, nor would I end with such ill-omened words. Dear girl, I too have learned the deception of life in other ways. Teach me, when I come to you, the great reality. In all O'Meara's memoranda after his return to New York I could find only a single direct allusion to the woman he loved. It was very brief: "On this day two years ago she said I made her happy!"