For Remembrance (ed. Repplier, 1901)/The Woods

The Convent Woods.

The Woods.

[As a perpetual record, a Jubilee Grove is planted on the brow of the hill called "The Woods." Time and electricity had thinned the trees on this knoll, and Mrs. M. B. Fraley much attached to this playground of childhood, suggested that the old pupils should bestow and name a number of forest trees.]

HE jubilee day would not have been quite perfect without an hour in "The Woods," that playground of our childhood, whereof the very name was a mystery and an awful charm. How deep it seemed, how dark, and how vast! Our youthful imagination readily supplied its moist dells and shady groves with the graceful fairies and grinning dwarfs in whom we were old-fashioned enough to believe, and whose presence the scene demanded. Not Arden's forest was more enchantingly redolent of romance. Jacques, the melancholy, would not have astonished us there, nor Titania have disturbed our games. Is there one of us who does not recall with delightful horror the very name of "Poison Valley"? Are there any other anemones and violets and spring beauties like those that decked "The Woods" every April? To this day the first intoxicating odor of the reviving earth in early spring brings back a flood of happy memories, (for nothing is more subtly suggestive than a perfume), and I am once more a convent girl, rejoicing over the first found bloodroot of the year. Such memories grow only dearer with the passing years; and so it was not strange that to some of us who loved every individual tree of the Eden woods the thought should come that we, too, should like to be represented there by living memorials long after our brief day. Already several sturdy young trees have been planted as souvenirs of convent friendships, and more have been promised. So that it seems as if in time there would be quite a grove of representative trees, bearing the names of Eden's old children, and sheltering the newer generations whose good fortune it will be to take our place in "The Woods." If this, their life

"Exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in running- brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything,"

shall not the good abide for remembrance?

M. B. F.